How to Grow Your Business with Video

Video is quickly becoming the dominant form of content online. Views, shares and uploads of video are accelerating at a breakneck pace. Many forms of existing content, such as blog posts and how-to articles, are also pivoting to video rather than text-based formats.

People simply can’t get enough of video!

For business owners, video content can be a key part of their strategy to earn new customers and grow their company. Video marketing has started to offer incredible returns on investment for companies of all sizes. Adding a video to your website product pages can increase conversions by 80%! That’s probably why 83% of business owners say that video offers great ROI.

To help your company get started using video effectively and using it to grow your revenues, consider the following five helpful tips below. You’ll learn why video is such an important asset and how to use it in a way to maximize your positive results.

Start Simple With Slide Shows

Some business owners may think they don’t have the resources to even bother with video. These limited resources can include time, money, creativity or even patience.

What these entrepreneurs should realize is that video does not have to be a big-budget affair in order to be highly polished and visually appealing. In fact, you can start instantly making videos for free right now and have them ready to upload in seconds.

There are dozens upon dozens of free video makers online designed for this exact purpose. Many offer options for combining text and images to create a dynamic slideshow. These videos are nearly effortless to make, yet they are still immersive and look professional.

Great options to get started making your own slideshow style videos include Renderforest and Adobe Spark Video. Both are free with a registered account. They also utilize great-looking templates, so you don’t have to be Spielberg-level genius to create your first videos. Simply pick from the options, input your own text or photos, and let the program do the rest.

Examples of great text-based videos include:

• Repurposing existing blogs or content pages as short videos
• Creating a quick explainer to get people excited about what you have to offer
• Revealing interesting information or “#MondayMotivation” style inspiration related to your area of business
• Giving a “thank you” to your existing customers
• Announcing big things on the way, such as a new product or event

Creating videos like these can get you in the habit of thinking visually rather than textually, which can help you earn more views and raise interest in your business offerings.

Create Product Reviews or Descriptions of Your Core Services

Once you feel comfortable to start investing more into your video content, descriptive videos are the way to go. Short 1-2 minute videos giving an overview of the products or services you offer can significantly improve awareness and interest.

 According to Hubspot, people who watch a video reviewing or explaining a product are 64% more likely to buy that product later on. Using an explainer video on your homepage can similarly double your conversion rate. 

When reviewing products, stay focused on features and key selling points the consumer is most likely to care about. Think about it as a resource, not an ad. Do your best to compare this product to others, helping your customers get an idea of the range of options available to them.

 For a great example, check out motorcycle accessory retailer RevZilla. Pages for products like this $300 backpack explain exactly what the product is supposed to be used for, what its most notable features are, and what separates it from other available options. After watching a video like that, someone may not only understand why they might want a $300 backpack but have a serious desire to buy one after realizing just how much it offers. 

For service-oriented explainer videos, try to think of it as a presentation. You’re walking the visitor through what your service offers and how it benefits them. Many of these videos start off by revealing a specific pain point that the product solves before moving into key benefits or competitive differentiators. 

If you need a way to warm up to this type of content, try doing it live. You can broadcast a Facebook Live post, for instance, where you have a Q&A with your audience or offer a live demonstration of what you do. Going through the motions in a low-stakes environment like this can give you an idea of what to do for a more polished version down the road.

Personify Your Brand Through Video Marketing Content

Video content isn’t just good for information — that’s why only a slim margin of movies are documentaries, after all! The rest aim to give viewers an emotional experience or to tell an engrossing story.

Video is particularly great at these emotion-focused concepts because it combines several of our senses at once. Through powerful images, mood-appropriate music, and clever editing techniques, you can communicate the soul of your brand in surprisingly subtle ways.

To see what we mean, take a look at this charming ad from the tourism board for the Faroe Islands. It manages to reveal many things that make the Faroe Islands and its people so special without ever stepping into outright advertisement. The subject is interesting, it’s well filmed, and something people can relate to instantly.

Videos like these are great for solidifying your branding and generating awareness from your audiences. Since people are able to remember 95% of what they see in a video — compared to just 10% of the text they read — videos like these help keep your business top-of-mind. That way, you earn more recommendations and sales while forging strong positive associations to your unique brand values and personality.

Use Video to Climb to the Top of Search Results

People love video, and search engines want to accommodate people. So, naturally, search engines now love video! 

According to one study, you are 53 times more likely to show up as the first result on Google when you have a video embedded in your page. It therefore makes a huge amount of sense to accompany each new page or blog you submit with a short, relevant video. 

Make sure the video offers value to the audience and not just the search engine, though. “Tricky” practices like just shoehorning content into a poorly made video show up on Google’s behavioral data, and over time the algorithm will likely be refined to punish such habits. 

So, create good videos that fit naturally within your content, and reap benefits from both audiences and the increase in traffic thanks to search engines. 

Be Your Own Harshest Critic

Producing video can help you quickly stand out among your competitors, but that can mean “standing out” in a negative way if your quality is poor.

Here’s a few simple tips to help improve your video quality:

• Use a tripod. Even smartphone cameras can look great when they have a stable mount.
• Provide lots of light sources on your subject. Cameras look much less blurry when they’re focused on something bathed in light. Use floor lamps or professional lighting setups to get the look you need.
• Be aware of your background. Modern cameras are so easy to use because they auto-focus, but this can mean focusing on the wrong subject if you have something distracting or more brightly lit in the background.
• Have great sound quality. Poor sound can sometimes hurt a video worse than poor camera quality. Invest in a clippable mic or a directional make, and don’t film in locations with lots of background noise or echo.

Fortunately, there are lots of other resources available to help you learn how to create high quality video content with a professional look. You can get started with this enlightening Hubspot article or rely on communities like Facebook for Creators, for instance.

Be patient, experiment, and set lofty goals to improve your content over time. If you can do that while caring about your audience, you are setting the stage for your business’s video marketing success!

source https://amrutservices.com/how-to-grow-your-business-with-video/

Why Your Online Marketing Budget May Soon Go Up

Recent surveys show that the majority of businesses plan to increase their digital marketing budgets over the next 12 months. These increases mean stiffer competition and growing rates to achieve the desired level of impressions and performance.

Today’s internet marketing practices have matured dramatically since the days of dial up. Channels like social media have likewise matured, changing the landscape from a “Wild West” feeling to a more familiar competitive market. As businesses spend more on aspects of marketing like paid ad inventory, prices go up. There is, after all, a finite number of eyeballs browsing the internet at any given time.

Businesses also find themselves competing more earnestly for organic traffic and impressions. While it used to be easy to rank high on search engines if you were the only business on the block doing SEO, now achieving results pits you against countless others.

With all this going on, business owners should expect to dig deeper into their pockets in the near future in order to achieve their goals for awareness, revenues, growth, and more. To help encourage you to keep pace, here are some observations we’ve made that reveal the current state of online marketing and indicate where it could be going soon.

Survey Says: Online Marketing Spending Growth Outpaces Traditional Ads

In a recent survey of CMOs, the respondents indicated that they intend to increase their digital marketing spending by 15.1% on average. By comparison, the average respondent said they plan to shrink their traditional advertising spending by 1.7%.

The decrease follows a distinct trend of budgets shrinking for traditional media, which includes ads on TV, radio, print, billboards, and other non-digital channels. The last time budgets increased by more than 1% was in 2011. Since that point, budgets were cut by an average of 1.6% every six months. That’s a total drop of 22% in traditional ad spending from 2011 to the present.

In the meantime, digital marketing budgets have increased by double digits every six months with only one exception. The changes equal a 167.5% increase, for an average of 12% every six months.

Spending on digital and traditional marketing techniques is diverging, and the effects are more noticeable in certain industries. Business-to-consumer (B2C) companies in particular say that they will have the biggest jumps. Product-focused B2C companies intend to increase digital marketing budgets by 17.9%, and service-based B2C companies say they will increase their budgets by 18.2%.

All of these data points indicate a steady stream of dollars flowing into digital channels. Companies in all sectors are investing more in online marketing campaigns, including content creation, strategy, management, promotion, and actions like performance measurement.

Budgets Stay Largely Flat as a Portion of Marketing Spending and Revenues

While budgets are increasing across the board for most companies, the ratio of that budget to other key metrics has remained stable for the most part.

The current industry average for marketing budgets as a portion of overall spending sits at 11.1%. This ratio is mostly unchanged since 2011. Similarly, marketing spending as a portion of company revenues is an average of 7.9% this year. That number has increased and decreased by small increments since 2012, barring a slight jump and then regression in Fall 2012.

So what does this mean in terms of trends? Well, if spending is increasing but budgets as a ratio are staying flat, that indicates that companies tie their spending growth to sales growth and budget growth. You could chalk these strong correlations to inflation or a general growth trend in both revenues and spending. You could also observe that, across all industries, spending strategies remain fairly conservative.

But a few key distinctions are to be made if you take the time to break down spending further. For instance, the ratio of money spent on content marketing compared to a business’s entire budget can dictate their ability to accomplish their content marketing goals.

In a survey of B2C companies using content marketing, the average respondent said they spent 22% of their marketing budget on content. The companies that rated themselves as “least successful” at accomplishing their goals spent an average of 18%, while the companies that said they were the “most successful” spent 26%.

These differences were even more pronounced among business-to-business (B2B) companies. The average B2B content marketing spend was 26% of their overall marketing budget. Yet, the least successful companies spent just 14%, while the most successful ones spent a whopping 40% on average.

So, while the aggregated data may hint that online marketing spending strategies are conservative, companies that lean into their digital marketing campaigns with a larger budget percentage tend to see better performance.

Costs of Online Advertising on the Rise

One of the biggest factors encouraging companies to increase their budgets is that costs have risen. According to a study by Adobe, the costs of digital advertising are rising five times faster than the current rate of inflation in the U.S.

Looking at data from 2014 to 2016, mobile display ad prices increased 12%, video ads increased 13%, and mobile paid search ads went up 11%.

Overall, companies spent 42% more on search advertising. At the same time, search engine traffic increased by just 11%. These two observations together mean that competition is getting more fierce for smaller slices of traffic.

Similar trends can be seen with social media advertising. Companies engaging in social media marketing are having a harder time earning impressions organically. To compensate, they are increasing their volume of paid social campaigns as well as their budgets. Bid prices for limited ad inventory go up.

In total, experts predict that ad prices for Facebook could rise anywhere between 25% and 79% in the coming year.

Few Companies Measuring Performance, Impact and ROI

As the costs of marketing rise, it’s more important than ever to measure impact and performance. Without this data, businesses could spend on campaigns and activities that don’t bring them measurable value.

Also, they lack the data to optimize their campaigns over time. Without knowing, for instance, that one social media campaign type brought better performance than another, the business will have fewer decision-making tools in hand to strategize for future campaigns.

Despite the risks described above, 58% percent of companies don’t use marketing analytics to measure performance and help them make decisions. For social media marketing, 34% of companies don’t measure the impact of their campaigns at all. 42% claim they have a good “qualitative sense” of how their campaigns are performing but don’t have the numbers to back up these observations.

The situation is even more dire with content marketing. 5% of companies don’t have any content marketing target metrics to speak of. 41% don’t measure content marketing ROI, and 21% say they are “unsure” as to whether they are accurately measuring ROI.

Every penny you spend on digital marketing counts, especially as costs rise. Make sure you have a strategy in place to maximize your returns, as well as tools you can use to measure those returns quantifiably

If you need help getting to this point, we’re here for you. Contact us today for assistance with planning, executing, measuring, and optimizing your digital marketing strategies.

Get prepared for the future with the expertise you need to compete and stay ahead as the digital marketing realm becomes more expensive.

source https://amrutservices.com/why-your-online-marketing-budget-may-soon-go-up/

11 Steps to a Successful Social Media Contest

Running contests on social media offers one of the best strategies for getting audiences engaged, earning shares, and generating impressions. Following a careful procedure can increase your contest’s chances of success.

On the other hand, not having a plan and a strategy can mean that even the most popular contests accomplish little in the way of marketing goals, while taking resources from other campaigns. Or, worse, the contest can turn into a giant mess that leaves a sore spot on your brand image.

So, to make sure your contest has the best odds of helping boost your social media marketing performance, use the following 11 steps below. They’ll help you strategize for your contest, plan it out, create a schedule, and follow through on everything in a way that leaves both your participants and your fellow co-workers satisfied with the results.

1. Decide on a Social Media Marketing Goal

Many contests start by thinking of a great promotion, prize or theme. The goals get defined later.

While this approach feels natural because thinking about prizes or contest themes is exciting, there’s danger in not having a focus from the beginning. Your goals can easily get diluted or intermingled in a way that makes them ineffective.

For instance, let’s say you are a scuba diving certification company. You want people to enter into a contest to win some free gear. If your ultimate goal is to get people to sign up for lessons, then the format of your contest needs to be positioned toward people who have never scuba dived before.

The problem is that only people with scuba experience may share your contest since they are the only people who know how valuable the gear you’re offering is. To fix the problem, the contest needs to highlight from the beginning how winning your gear set makes it easier than ever to start scuba diving. Without this perspective, you may instead end up pitching the value of a feature-packed diving watch, which will read as “all Greek” to people who aren’t familiar.

So, start from a defined goal and let the structure of the contest expand organically from there.

Common goals include:

• Increasing overall purchases.
• Increasing brand awareness.
• Increasing conversion actions like demo signups/free lesson signups/webinar registrations/content downloads.
• Capturing emails.
• Increasing site traffic.
• Earning more page likes/followers.

Make sure that no matter what, your contest reinforces your goals. If, for example, you want to earn more traffic, make visiting a landing page on your site mandatory for entry. The landing page should also have a call to action suggesting people browse your content or your products. Similarly, if your aim is to increase purchases, you can make a purchase a necessary part of entry.

2. Decide on Your Hosting and Promotional Venues

The venue you host your contest on can have huge consequences for how your contest is structured and how it will play out over time. Some platforms – i.e., Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram – have strict rules regarding how contests are held and how they are conducted.

Eventually, you will need a legal team to review your contest plan before you put it into action. The venues you use to host and/or promote the campaign will affect their recommendations for what you can and cannot do.

Note that “hosting” a contest refers to all of the contest activities taking place on that platform. For instance, if you are going to make the entry requirement sharing a post and the prize drawing comes from those shares, the contest is occurring on that platform.

On the other hand, if you are going just to be promoting the contest on social media and the actual entry and other activities takes place on your own site, that creates a different set of conditions.

Realize that the more channels you have your contest hosted on, the more complex your campaign will become. You can reduce complexity by directing everyone to one point of entry, such as prompting “Enter on Facebook” or “Visit Our Website to Enter!” This strategy makes promoting your contest across multiple channels easier without having to add data-gathering and community management headaches.

3. Decide How People Will Enter Your Social Media Contest

A few entry requirement options you can consider are to:

• Submit email and other contact information.
• Require a connecting action, such as “liking” or “following” your page.
• Require an engagement action, such as “liking,” commenting, or sharing a particular post.
• Ask people to cast their vote using polling tools on Facebook or Twitter or on your own website.
• Create and submit user generated content for judgement, meaning the selected best entry gets the prize.

Direct submissions of emails typically take the least amount of effort to track, especially if you use a custom form. Requiring people to comment, like or share a post can be similarly easy, although this engagement may not connect meaningfully with the desired goal or conversion action.

Voting can be another easy entry mechanism, but you may want to steer people to a custom form since many social platforms register votes anonymously.

Creating user-generated content is an awesome idea since it leads to the creation of marketing assets you can later use while bringing higher levels of engagement to your campaign. However, you will need to review the legal requirements of such a campaign and disclose details like ownership rights and liability to anyone who submits.

Software tools are available to help you track data such as new page “likes,” so you can differentiate new entrants from people who already like your page. These tools include Strutta, Shortstack, Wishpond, and Rafflecopter. Of these, Rafflecopter has the best pricing and is singularly dedicated to contests.

4. Create a Contest Theme and a Name

Your social media contest theme should have its own set of branding devices in play. The more vivid your branding, the more excited entrants will be. Well-branded and themed contests also have a way of attracting more attention.

Remember that the clarity of the theme and also the clarity of a contest title can make or break participation. Shorter names are usually better, especially since space is limited on social posts for Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms.

5. Settle on a Contest Timeline

Decide on a date you will make the final prize announcement. Then, work backward from this date to plot out when drawing/judging will start and end. Going further, decide when entry is closed, when it is open, when promotion for the contest starts, and any other key dates involved.

Build in the needed time to handle everything, especially if snags or hurdles emerge. You need to give yourself time to plan and design creative elements, get approval from legal, and accomplish other milestones.

6. Decide on Prizes or Giveaways

You may have already had a prize or giveaway in mind, but you should wait to finalize this decision until you have all the other above elements in place. Holding off prevents you from getting locked into the prize aspect and losing focus on everything else. If you’ve seen the Office episode where Michael Scott auctions off non-existent Bruce Springsteen tickets, you know what we mean.

As we suggested above, ensure the prize directly ties into your goals, your desired customer path, and your business as a whole. Offering a generically appealing prize like a free iPhone can earn you thousands of entrants, but most of these entrants will not be viable customer leads.

Instead, think of prizes that connect to your business, your brand, and your most important values. Also, try to think of a storytelling angle so that your prize winner can become a testimonial of sorts, illustrating what makes your company great.

 

7. Draft an Editorial and Social Content Calendar

Using the timeline you created, plan out ahead of time exactly what types of social media posts and other promotional collateral will be needed and when it will be published. You can always use placeholder content or deviate from your calendar, but the last thing you want to do is promote your contest off-the-cuff with no real approval or planning.

To help you decide what kind of content will be needed when, think of your social media contest in six discrete phases:

1. Pre-launch.
2. Launch.
3. Last chance for entries.
4. Closed for entries.
5. Winner announcements.

Post-contest promotion and related campaigns.

8. Develop Your Promotional Strategy

You want to amplify visibility for your contest as much as possible, especially during the first few days of launch. Having a “slow burn” strategy actually hurts your chances for entrants since posts with little engagement tend to get buried. However, posts that get tons of engagement the moment they are created tend to be discovered more readily by late-comers.

Include paid ads, organic promotions, website content, and social media content within your promotional strategy. You don’t have to have a huge budget for any one particular thing, but generally the more you can invest, the better your results will be.

9. Have a Community Management and Crisis Plan in Place

Since it will be hosted online, your contest will essentially run 24/7. You therefore need a plan for someone to monitor activities during off-business hours.

Remember that contests tend to overwhelm unprepared social media marketing teams since they create a flood of engagement compared to the normal day-to-day. Be prepared for this in advance.

Also, have a backup plan in case things go wrong. Hopefully, you will never have to implement your crisis management plan, but having it prepared ensures you have a set damage containment strategy rather than responding on-the-fly. Sometimes when we improvise while handling stressful situations, we can make things worse, so have your backup plan written down.

10. Finalize Your Rules, and Have Legal Review Everything

The last thing you want is for your contest to result in a lawsuit or bad PR. You should therefore have experienced legal counsel verify that all your rules, prizes, and general procedures are appropriate and legal.

Consider that if you run your contest nationally or internationally, different states may have different rules regarding contests and prizes. You want to be in compliance everywhere possible, which may even mean restricting entry within certain geographical areas.

11. Document Everything So You Can Learn in the Future

As an extra step, make sure you take notes on as much of what you learn as you can. Also, gather data throughout the contest, so you can trace ROI and whether you’ve met your goals. This documentation may be extra work, but it will pay off by helping you learn lessons and improve over time.

If you need help with social media marketing or hosting a social media contest, you can always look to outside expertise. Contact us today if you need assistance planning your contest, tying it to your goals, or simply verifying that it has the best possible chance of bringing you success.

source https://amrutservices.com/11-steps-to-a-successful-social-media-contest/

Six Things Your B2B Content Marketing Needs to Be Doing

Business-to-business (B2B) content marketing uses many of the same principles as business-to-consumer (B2C) strategies but with a few key differences. Honing in on these differences can ensure that your B2B marketing strategies remain relevant and effective in our ever-evolving business climate.

In fact, your B2B content marketing strategy will include several “must have” components. Without them, your ability to generate leads, convert those leads, and retain existing customers could suffer greatly. With these “must haves,” you can increase your chances of success and ensure that your content marketing campaigns follow all of the latest recommended best practices.

So, to help you improve your B2B content marketing strategy to be as effective as possible, here are the six “musts” you need in place.

Have a Documented Content Strategy

There’s power in the simple act of writing things down, yet so many B2B companies neglect to document their content marketing strategy! In fact, in a recent survey shows just 37% of all B2B companies said that they had a documented content marketing strategy at all.

Looking at just the B2B companies finding the most success with content marketing, only 62% said they had a documented content marketing strategy. This, despite the fact that they dedicated 40% of their total marketing budget to content marketing on average.

The danger in not having a documented strategy is that important details are left up in the air. You may not realize there is a gap in how your content strategy is able to nurture late stage buyers to an actual purchase. Or, you may fail to define your specific content marketing goals, leading to campaigns that are poorly optimized.

Most worrisome, not having documentation leaves critical parts of your content marketing campaigns open to interpretation. A writer may create content with a completely different audience in mind than your target personas, and without documentation there is no way for them to know otherwise.

Every person involved in creating content should have the same intent and abide by all of the necessary markers of quality, so the content you create is consistent and up to your expectations.

Define your content goals. Outline your expectations for each piece created. Ensure that your content marketing campaigns account for your buyer personas during key stages in their journey. Getting all of these things down in writing can help you have more precise control over your results, while achieving quality more in line with your expectations.

Conduct Original Research and Publish It

Your B2B company can survive by simply regurgitating and repackaging information obtained by others, but it will face stiff competition from those that publish their own research.

According to one survey, half of B2B companies say that their original research reports generate leads that have the highest conversion rates. This makes them the most effective form of content, beating out video, webinars, case studies, white papers, and social media content.

Conducting your own research can be tough, but the efforts pay off. People will share and cite your information readily, as long as it provides current information that answers an important business question. Your research can also earn you a top spot on search engine results if it covers an important topic, follows SEO guidelines, and earns shares from websites with high domain authority.

Aim for Content Downloads, Which Correlate to the Highest Customer Conversion Rates

B2B companies don’t just want engagement or occasional readers. They want paying customers. Therefore, they should seek out the content marketing methods most likely to earn them a customer conversion out of their sales leads.

Surprisingly, content downloads had the highest conversion rate according to the same survey cited above. 66% of companies listed them as the asset with the best conversion rate. Webinars came in second, which seems counterintuitive given how much of a time investment registering and attending one can be. Equally surprising – demo requests came in third.

Nevertheless, creating premium content and requiring a download seems to be the most effective content marketing tactic for generating qualified leads and converting them to completed sales. Consider this as you determine which types of content are priorities and most deserving of your time, money and effort.

Tap Subject Matter Experts and Industry Influencers to Gain More Traction

The right input from the right source can make a huge difference in the perceived value B2B marketing content offers. By crowd sourcing information, ideas, and quotable phrases from recognizable names in your industry, you can amplify the authority your content projects while making it more appealing.

One company revealed to Forbes that on-boarding influencers was a game changer for their content marketing effectiveness. They switched from a focus of educating target audiences to engaging them in discussions. The topics they covered had no right answers, making them more interesting to explore and contribute to. Having influencers submit their own input completed the package and helped the content have broader appeal.

Using this strategy, the company was able to earn seven times the amount of impressions and 160% more engagement compared to their average post before the switch.

When seeking out influencers to contribute, make the process of responding as simple as possible. Ask one direct, easy-to-grasp question, and let them know exactly what the intended guidelines are. If you can reduce the effort required to contribute to the project, you can improve your response rate and get more people to contribute their valuable input.

Don’t Neglect Video and Visuals

Visuals help “sell” content and make it into a much more appealing package. When you have the resources, make sure to pull important quotes and statistics from your content and repurpose them into easy-to-read graphics.

These graphics will undoubtedly get more visual attention and shares compared to text-only options. They also make for impactful assets any time you want to promote your content on social media. Don’t be surprised if many people seem to just read the photos and not really dig into the article itself!

If you want even better engagement, video content is where the industry is headed these days. Four times as many people say they would prefer to watch a video about a product or service compared to reading about it.

Key decision makers in particular are busy and enjoy having information compacted into a format that combines audio and visual information. 75% of executives claim that they watch branded video content related to their industry at least weekly, and 65% say that they later visit the website of the brand that created the video.

Like graphics, video combines well with other content and can also be a great way to repurpose it. Creating an executive summary of a research report can encourage downloads, for instance, while providing a more appealing and easily shareable format to earn more impressions.

Remember B2B Content Marketing Is for Retention and Not Just New Leads

B2B content marketing is one of the most effective methods at getting past customers to return to the buying cycle. Unfortunately, many B2B companies neglect this fact and only create content with new leads in mind. Remember that it costs a fifth as much on average to convert past customers into repeat buyers compared to converting new sales leads.

Offering content for those in the post-purchase phase can enhance their buyer satisfaction while keeping your business top-of-mind. Your content can also help turn them into brand evangelists by giving them information they’d be excitedly willing to share with their friends, colleagues, and social media followers.

Because of these benefits, make sure to account for repeat buyers’ needs within your persona and your B2B content strategy in general.

Ready to Start Selling More? Get Help Creating and Optimizing Your B2B Content Strategy

The path to success for B2B content marketing is never easy nor obvious, and it must be customized to fit the unique needs of your particular company and your target personas.

Get help forming a strategy that accounts for all of the above “must haves,” while increasing your chances of meeting or even exceeding your marketing goals. Contact us today to find out how!

source https://amrutservices.com/six-things-your-b2b-content-marketing-needs-to-be-doing/

Are You Stealing These Top Content Marketing Strategies? You Should Be!

Generating ideas for your content marketing strategy can be extremely tough. It gets even harder when you focus so much on your brand goals that you get tunnel vision. Fortunately, there are plenty of brands out there doing an amazing job with content marketing and getting great results.

You should totally steal from them. Really.

Think of it as evolution rather than imitation. You see what works for them, and try to put your own twist on it. As you measure results, you refine your campaigns over time to become a better version more-suited for your unique branding and goals. If you’re doing it right, someone will steal from you someday.

To get you inspired by others’ inspiration, here are five amazing content marketing campaign strategies that are completely worth ripping off.

Focus on Storytelling and Client Successes

Some content fails to hit the mark because it’s too deeply embedded within the brand. It lacks a human touch, and people may therefore end up trusting the messages less.

To come across as more authentic, pull back. Think less about your brand or product and more about what your particular solution does. Or, focus on a pain point it solves.

An amazingly creative example of this is the Fixodent video “Saving Aslan”. It covers the struggles of a gorgeous white lion who suffered from a loss of his canine. To save the lion and ensure he enjoys a good quality of life, Fixodent sponsored wildlife activists efforts to perform surgery on the lion.

The video hits tons of high points: emotion, gorgeous animals, environmental advocacy, people performing powerful acts of kindness, redemption. It has all of the ingredients to go viral, and it communicates a parallel message to the branding without beating you over the head with it.

Another great example comes from REI. It’s Co-Op Journal site highlights feats and lifestyles for people who live to have outdoor adventures. The stories are human-focused and promise to show readers things they’ve never seen before: a powerful recipe to draw clicks. People get inspired, they learn a lesson, and they get to learn about new heroes worth keeping track of.

You don’t have to be quite as ambitious as these two brands to find your own version of storytelling success. Just take a step back to focus on your clients or the difference you make in the world.

Tell a great story. Highlight great things happening in your industry. Demonstrate what your philosophy or business approach can do. Clicks will naturally follow.

Crowdsource Content

Crowdsourcing is an brilliant way to win engagement, improve the appeal of your content, and develop relationships with your audience.

Airbnb, for instance, combines storytelling with crowdsourcing. They let their own user base tell them what makes the platform special, and then they add a layer of gloss to the story so that it fits their brand standards. The stories end up coming across as more authentic and interesting as a result.

Another option for crowdsourcing is to let your own audience decide on your next campaign. Makeup brand Bobbi Brown allowed its social community to vote on the lipstick shades they would bring out of retirement.

Coca Cola let people submit entire marketing campaign ideas for a slew of their campaigns.

You don’t have to have huge audiences to get this type of traction, though. Simply let people feel like they are participating in something and that their voice matters.

A stellar example would be to highlight a particular community or organization through crowd input. Or, you could donate to charity and let people decide on their favorite cause. Campaign strategies like these build momentum as they continue and have huge payoffs when people see their own ideas come to life.

Be Quirky, Go Viral

For a time, brands tried oh-so-hard to be weird with mixed results.

Yet, weird, humorous and unusual content often gets the most attention through social channels.

The key to success with this strategy is to approach content like a normal social user would. Think about what would be genuinely be funny, intriguing, or at very least worth a closer look. Let go of your professionalism (but don’t be offensive!), and see what happens when you let your own interests or weird ideas come to life.

Denny’s has found huge success with the strategy. Quirky posts like this Twitter photo earn tons of attention and retweets. They barely have anything to do with a traditional ad goal, but they get people interacting.

An auteur-type strategy works especially well if your content can find appeal within a niche community. Arby’s use of packaging and branded imagery to create artistic references to video games, anime, and popular pop culture franchises has been a huge hit with online communities.

People go online for good art and entertaining content, after all. Give them something they would love to see, but keep your brand visible so that people understand a connection is there. 

Create a Subtly Branded Publication to Build Trust

Not to give you whiplash, but this strategy is in many ways the opposite of the above one. Rather than offering amusing or beautiful diversions, your content can become one of the most trusted and valued resources among your audiences.

Turbotax company Intuit offers a great example. Taxes and financing are a dense subject not too many people feel comfortable with. A handy blog that answers their questions and defines key concepts is therefore likely to bring them a sigh of relief.

American Express’s small business blog expands on this concept even further. In addition to advice and introductory information, they provide news, highlight success stories, and offer opinions on important matters in the small business community.

The true mark of success for these blogs is that people will readily link to them and click on them in search results without bracing themselves for an ad pitch. Provide value. Satisfy your audience’s needs. If you can, they will trust you wholeheartedly. 

Collaborate With Micro-Influencers

Now is the time to stop ignoring micro-influencers.

Chances are almost 100% that there is someone in your field with more followers and perceived authority than you. Your job is to locate these influencers and find some way to collaborate with them.

A “collaboration” can be something as simple as a request to share your content or review something you send them. A subtle way to do this is to include a quote or reference to the person in a piece of content and tag them when promoting the content on social media.

Collaboration can go much deeper than that, though. Many makeup companies are finding huge success by partnering with YouTube channels that offer makeup tips and reviews, for instance.

Makeup brand MAC even asked top beauty influencers to come up with unique shades and product types related to their content channels. The brands get to share exposure and motivate the audiences of the channels, and the influencers get to feel like they are now a part of the products they review and interact with.

Just make sure to follow best practices for influencer marketing campaigns. The most important is to align your campaign to your goals and prioritize things like conversions over vanity metrics.

Steal to Succeed

Every business idea is an iteration on something that came before it, and that includes content marketing strategies. By using the above ideas or looking to the examples to come up with your own, you can branch out and try new things.

Well, they’ll be new to you at least!

We at Amrut Services, are expert at content marketing and can help you get most out of your content. So lets talk and make solid content marketing plans.

source https://amrutservices.com/are-you-stealing-these-top-content-marketing-strategies-you-should-be/

Here’s the 6 Facebook Changes You Need to Know About…And What They Mean for Your Business

Facebook has evolved quite a bit since its launch in 2004 …for better or worse. When it comes to your business, you may lean closer to the “worse” category considering how hard it’s getting to reach your audiences without paying for ads.

On the bright side, there are more options than ever for connecting organically to your audiences in effective ways. For instance, Facebook’s emphasis on live video can create a quick path to engagement since the platform eagerly notifies people when a Page or person they follow goes live. Facebook messenger is also exploding in popularity, giving businesses the opportunity to create chatbots or personalized social support through chat channels.

So what exact changes should your business take note of the most, and how can you adjust your Facebook marketing strategy in response? Read on to find out!

 

Organic Reach Plummets for Facebook Pages, Businesses

The first thing businesses need to recognize is that organic reach for their Pages is plummeting. What this means is that if you have people who “like” your Page, and you post an update hoping it will reach them, there’s a good chance it won’t.

According to some agencies, the portion of their total audience that saw their unpromoted (no paid ad budget) posts was just 2%. This change happened at the same time that rates for promoting posts shot up 35%. Clearly, Facebook wants to motivate companies to spend money on advertising for the reach they once got for free.

“Because space in News Feed is limited,” the company’s public announcement reads, “showing more posts from friends and family and updates that spark conversation means we’ll show less public content, including videos and other posts from publishers or businesses.”

According to Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, the aim of the update is to “prioritize posts that spark conversations and meaningful interactions between people.” That’s fair since most Facebook users really do prefer to see posts from friends over businesses they follow, but that isn’t true across the board. Even if someone loves a local restaurant or wants to see what a friend’s business is up to, posts made by businesses just aren’t likely to show up as often anymore.

However, the announcement contains a silver lining: if your Page gets lots of engagement, you won’t notice as much of a decline in reach. “Pages making posts that people generally don’t react to or comment on could see the biggest decreases in distribution” asserts Facebook, while “Pages whose posts prompt conversations between friends will see less of an effect.”

So, the aim of your new content strategy should be to create things that get a response from your audience. It could be a quote they want to share, or a question likely to stir up debate like “should you put mayonnaise on your hamburger?”

Think in terms of what people enjoy seeing when they log on and have this type of content dovetail with your marketing goals. You can also make smart use of a few tools we’ll mention just a little further down.

Live Video Gets a Relative Boost

Facebook’s live video feature already has a pretty obvious presence on people’s newsfeeds. Any time a person or Page they’re connected to goes live, the app automatically shows the video and sends out an alert by default.

Reading between the lines of another section of Facebook’s newsfeed algorithm changes, it sounds like business Pages can still reap all of these benefits.Quote:

“Page posts that generate conversation between people will show higher in News Feed. For example, live videos often lead to discussion among viewers on Facebook – in fact, live videos on average get six times as many interactions as regular videos. Many creators who post videos on Facebook prompt discussion among their followers, as do posts from celebrities. In Groups, people often interact around public content. Local businesses connect with their communities by posting relevant updates and creating events. And news can help start conversations on important issues.” (Emphasis ours)

Live video provides many great opportunities to businesses that know how to use it right. You don’t have to spend a lot of time or money preparing for a video since you’re basically hosting a webcam-type session. You get to be yourself and give people a behind-the-scenes look, two things that breed authenticity and therefore trust.

So, start experimenting with live video as a way to keep your audience’s attention and stay on their newsfeeds. Options for a live video session include:

• Behind the scenes tours
• Q&A sessions for common questions your business gets
• Interviews between key staff members
• Step-by-step explanations of the process the business uses
• Marking events, like singing “happy birthday” as an office to celebrate the anniversary of the business’s founding
• Silly stuff, like office pranks or mascots engaging in everyday work.

Connecting to People Through Facebook Messenger Becomes More Important

While getting your Page’s posts on people’s newsfeeds may have gotten harder, nothing’s there to stop you from receiving messages through the Facebook Messenger platform.

The Facebook Messenger app sees over 70 million daily users and 1.3 billion users a month. Sending a quick chat through the service is incredibly convenient, and for some people, it has even reduced the amount of text messages they send.

People also really like being able to reach out to businesses through the service. They can ask the staff a question, place an order, voice a complaint, or get pretty much any information they need. In fact, one out of every three social media users say that they would prefer using social media to a phone call or an email.

Ignoring these help requests can be enough to sour a customer’s opinion of you, too. According to one study, companies that don’t respond to complaints have a 15% higher churn rate. Another study found that over 30% of people will complain to friends both online and offline about their bad experience.

So, people are willing to connect to businesses on social media, and companies need to be prepared for these types of interactions.

Those that are prepared create excellent opportunities that stem from personalized, 1:1 conversations. You get to hear the exact information the customer or lead needs to hear to get you closer to a sale, and you build a relationship in the process.

If you want to scale your ability to handle these conversations or be able to respond 24/7, you could always rely upon a chatbot. These computer-controlled services can automatically respond to messages and answer simple questions. If they get something they don’t think they can handle, they can hand off the conversation to a human.

Whether using chatbots or your own thumbs, don’t overlook the potential interacting with customers through Facebook messenger can offer. 

Starting a Facebook Group Is Now Even More Effective

Another method to bring your audience to you is to create a new group on Facebook. People who join your group are very likely to see most of the messages posted there. You also get the advantage of directly interacting with people while gathering information on things they talk about related to your area of business.

The key thing to remember about creating a group is that it’s not just another chance to throw ads at someone. Instead, the group should offer them value. Typically, this value comes in the form of information or talking about a thing the entire group loves.

So, for instance, a handyman company may start a new group about handling do-it-yourself projects around the house. The company can tell people how to fix things on their own, but in the process, they can reveal how much work really goes into doing it right. If anyone thinks they’d rather go to a professional, they have a strong pull to turn to the group creator first.

Or, a landscaping company can start a group about lawn care and inspiration for designing your own outdoor areas. People can share photos of their projects, swap tips, and talk about their passion for gardening or landscaping.

With this strategy, the connection between the company and the group focus is obvious but not obnoxious. The business demonstrates what it can offer and builds a community while also creating new lead opportunities.

Facebook Local Launches, Could Be Worth a Look for Event-Based Facebook Marketing

Facebook Local is a recently relaunched version of their old Events app. It acts very similar to Yelp in that it can provide reviews and directions to local listed businesses. It also allows all users, including businesses, to create new events.

Combining these features can be very handy, especially if your business happens to throw lots of events. Creating Facebook events is a convenient way to gauge how big attendance will be and send people automated reminders about when the event’s happening.

On the other hand, adoption of the Facebook Local app has been slow to pick up. If it feels like a good fit for your business because you’re a social butterfly, feel free to give it a try, but others may want to wait and see. 

More Incentives to Try to Find Your Local Influencers

Since posts crossing from brands to people seem to have a hard time earning reach, a business’s best bet is to try and make person-to-person mentions of their brand more common.

In other words: you want to find your own version of “influencers.” That doesn’t mean paying a YouTuber with a million followers thousands of dollars to create poorly edited videos on your behalf. But rather, find people within your community or industry niche who already tend to engage with your brand on social a lot. Each time this engagement happens, it can show up on the newsfeed for friends of that person.

You can then cater your approach towards these highly vocal and friendly individuals. Let them do the broadcasting of your content for you. This strategy works especially well if you create things they are willing to share directly to their wall or tag someone else in.

Keep an eye out for allies, tap the resources you have available, and get creative with how you drive engagement. If you can do all of these things, the Facebook changes currently going into effect won’t have to hurt your marketing performance.

 

source https://amrutservices.com/heres-the-6-facebook-changes-you-need-to-know-about-and-what-they-mean-for-your-business/