Posts

4 Ways to Grab Consumer Attention

/in /by

StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |Capture Audience Attention|4 Ways to Grab Consumer AttentionBusinesses have a tough job on their hands when it comes to marketing and connecting with their desired audience. Research has discovered that a consumer’s brain can only process a certain amount of information before they lose concentration. Information is readily available and can be sourced by their fingertips whenever they choose. As a result, businesses are finding it tougher to engage their audiences with the vast amount of competition they’re up against.

If you’re a business owner, it’s essential you know how to capture your audience’s attention to enhance the success of your business. Here are 4 tips to keep in mind:

Avoid Prominent Branding

While the whole point of marketing is to get your brand message across, consumers don’t like to be bombarded or forced into taking action. Usually, their natural reaction is to hold back if they believe they’re being pushed to make a purchase. Within your content, take an understated approach and refrain from relying on the hard sell, which is a clever marketing technique known as ‘brand pulsing’. With this in mind, create an entertaining story around your brand and if you feel the need to incorporate your logo, ensure you keep it small and subtle to prevent distraction.

Find Out Who Your Audience Is

It’s extremely difficult to create a marketing pitch without understanding who your target market is. In order to find the right customers for your brand, you’ll need to carry out research as to who you should be targeting, based on their specific interests and needs. Some useful techniques include using Google Analytics, creating user surveys and connecting with followers on social media.

Use Video Advertising

Video advertising is becoming one of the hottest trends in marketing and boosts your chance of securing consumers by 35%. According to a study, 4 billion videos are being watched on YouTube every single day, so if you aren’t using video as part of your marketing strategy, you’re missing a trick.

Amazon and eBay are two of the world’s largest brands that have jumped on the bandwagon and have started using video advertisements to catch their audience’s attention. If you haven’t got the relevant experience to make a world-class video advertisement for your brand, it may be worth hiring a professional video production company such as Motion Giraffx to create either a 2D or 3D piece of video content to grab your audience’s attention.

Create Customer Connections

Whether you’re conducting marketing online or face-to-face, people favor businesses that take a humanized approach when connecting with their customer and clients.

Encourage your employees to have friendly conversations with your consumers, with the intention of forming a close professional connection. In doing so, you’ll help promote brand loyalty for the long term and hopefully encourage potential consumers to spread the word via word-of-mouth to their own contacts.

Your products and services have been created to satisfy a need, so play on this factor when chatting with your consumers. Express your understanding of their annoyances and how your product or service is the solution they’ve been looking for.

Spice Up Business Prospecting with Video

/in , , /by

StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article, Spice Up Business Prospecting with Video
 
We’re all creatures of habit. We find something that works and tend to stick with it. So long as we’re still seeing growth, why mess with the recipe?

The fact is that no matter your lead generation situation, everyone working with email prospecting can stand to explore some new concepts. If you rely on the same strategies regularly, you run the risk of losing that ability to grab attention, and wind up playing catch up in the funnel.

Video is a fantastic method to layer in some creativity, spicing up your prospecting in the process. It transcends the idea of tactics to encompass an entire new subsection of prospecting that can greatly benefit your efforts. The stats support it: prospecting reps that use video in their prospecting and sales emails get opens at over five times the amount of those that don’t, subsequently generating eight times higher open-to-reply rates.

And sure, video requires a certain amount of proficiency, but you don’t have to be a Hollywood director to get the job done. Most of us have some experience behind the camera without even realizing it, through social media and video chat applications. The reality of 2019 is that this alone represents a large scope of the necessary skill set to get started using video at the sales level. Using these key methods:

  • Drawing Attention to the Video
  • Avoid Overly-Aggressive Sales Call-To-Actions
  • Remind Viewers of Your Partnership
  • Edit in 30 Second Intros to Pre-Existing Videos

…we can tackle the process of incorporating video into our sales prospecting, and see the largest returns on our time investment.

Drawing Attention to the Video

How do you use video to transform the cold prospecting experience? What you need to note is that you’re trying to reach for an audience that, put simply, may not have a clue who you or your company are. Just like we noted in the opener, let them know about video right off the rip. You can do this by something as simple as including “video” in the email subject line, coupled with a thumbnail of the video in the email body. You can also explore embedding video links in email through the thumbnail to generate greater click-through. These methods will focus attention on the video, which is proven to generate a stronger response than plain text.

Avoid Overly-Aggressive Sales Call-To-Actions

Your videos and attached emails should be friendly in nature. Start up a conversation and avoid sales-speak. Remind your prospect that you’re there to introduce and provide education on products that are built to help their business grow. Be natural, use phrasing and terminology in your videos that are more conversational; avoid too much jargon. At the end, present a call-to-action, but there’s no need to be overt. “BUY NOW” can turn a lot of people off, so instead find creative calls-to-action that extend the conversation and foster a relationship that will last.

Remind Viewers of Your Partnership

Whether you have a pre-existing relationship or are building one from the ground up, remind customers that this pursuit is a partnership. If there was a particularly successful venture that you’re aware of in the past that your product assisted with, remind them of it. Make notes and utilize them in videos; feel free to mention particularly complimentary words they’ve shared in the past. Keep your reps consistent in videos as well; often times, people view themselves as working with an individual, not the company as a whole. Use first names when appropriate and leverage your relationship in the video. It’ll show that you’re consider them and their needs with your approach.

Edit in 30 Second Intros to Pre-Existing Videos

Make use of product videos, and feel free to share them with your customers. Go the next step by editing in a 30 second intro to personalize the content. This takes very little time and can be filmed with a camera at your desk. Say hello, tell them you were thinking about them when a new product was released recently and wanted to share it with them. This small touch can make a huge difference in your clientele relationship, and signals yet another way that video can augment the email prospecting experience with a dash of creativity.

About the Author

Sean Gordon has an extensive track record recruiting, hiring, training, and unlocking the talent of people. For 20 years, Sean has been on the front lines of business across North America. He started with AT&T, where he built award-winning teams in sales and operations from coast to coast. He delivered equally stellar results for EMC, Aetna and West Corporation before becoming CEO of a technology company in need of innovation.

Sean founded vidREACH.io to engage candidates, prospects, customers and employees – all on one platform. Sean has created new lines of business, reinvigorated stagnant company cultures, and mentored hundreds of employees who have gone on to do great things.

Connect with Sean Gordon on LinkedIn.

Using Video to Boost Online Sales

/in /by

StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |Video Marketing|Using Video to Boost Online SalesVideo is becoming a much bigger part of the internet, with even the most casual of users viewing videos online. We watch video advertisements. We tune in to Vloggers on YouTube. You might use instant videos to communicate with your friends and followers on platforms like SnapChat. Social media platforms like Facebook and even Instagram are seeing much more extensive use of video, and it’s almost impossible to scroll down your feed without viewing an online video. We stream our favorite TV shows on mediums like Netflix and Amazon Prime. We even use catch up services online to watch our favorite terrestrial shows. More families than ever are reporting that they no longer subscribe to any traditional TV package, instead choosing to stream all of the TV and films that they watch at home. On top of that, there are more specialist video services like Twitch, which are growing in popularity all of the time.

Research from online marketing outlet Digital Sherpa shows that video increases audience understanding by 74% and around 30% of everyone’s online activity is spent watching videos. It’s easy to see why using video is important, but if you are a small business, without much experience of creating your own online videos, or using videos in your digital campaigns, it can be a little overwhelming. Fortunately, description services can take out some of the hard, and more tedious work, and help you to ensure that your videos can benefit everyone. But, you still need to get stuck in for yourself. Here are just a few of the ways that your business could use video to boost sales.

To Build Trust

Building trusting relationships with your customers is essential if you want your business to grow. Without loyal and trusting relationships, you are always spending time trying to find new customers. You won’t have repeat custom, you won’t have a fanbase that spread positive word of mouth, and you won’t have clients that trust you enough to try new things and support your business through the inevitable ups and downs.

But, building this trust isn’t just about offering excellent products and services (of course, you should be doing that too), you need to provide more. Video gives you a fantastic way to give your customers more, to engage with them, to let them in a little more, and to make them feel as though you have a personal connection. Video gives you a chance to be more than just a faceless, souls brand. It makes you real.

To Explain and Educate

A brief description alone side a photo of a product or title of a service isn’t always enough to really show what you are offering. Video lets you explain your products and services. It can be a great way to troubleshoot and to give your customers advice. Video is much easier to understand than text, and many people find it easier to learn this way.

To Have Fun

Video, and vanishing videos especially, give you a way to have some fun with your audience. We focus so much on trying to be professional and serious, but it’s important to remember that people connect with other people, and they like to see more than the professional facade. Film some behind the scenes footage and let people in.

The Reasons Why Video Marketing is So Powerful

/in /by

StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales ArticleMany businesses don’t consider the power of video marketing because of the huge costs involved when it comes to video production. However, video marketing has been proven to be so powerful these days that even the smaller businesses that don’t have video production in their budgets are now jumping on the bandwagon. Businesses in all industries are now faced with high competition regardless of the niche, so it’s important for any business to compete with even better marketing strategies to have a chance of surviving – and that’s where video marketing comes into play. If you’re considering video production as your next marketing ploy, look at some of the below reasons why video marketing is so powerful.

Videos Boost Conversions

It has been proven that videos help boost conversions and sales. The figure differs between different industries, but there are reports that suggest a simple landing page video production has boosted conversions by a massive 80% – something that just can’t be ignored in the world of online marketing.

Excellent ROI Prospects

Many businesses overlook video production for their marketing ploys simply because they think it’s too expensive. No one can deny that the cost is often eye-watering, but given the fact a ROI is mostly guaranteed, there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be considered. Yes, video production could cost thousands or even more, but the returns on offer are limitless.

Viral Boosting Opportunities

All it takes is one video to get shared once for it to get shared hundreds of thousands of times. Granted, it takes a cracking idea to get onto that sort of level, but there’s no reason to suggest that it won’t happen for your business if you do it well.

Videos Build Trust

If your customers don’t trust your brand, you’re not going to have a brand that lasts. Therefore, it’s paramount you try and build trust from the get-go so your potential customers aren’t going to go elsewhere. Videos help businesses add a touch of human appeal to their brand, and that’s extremely important when building relationships.

Search Engines Crave Low Bounce Rates

If your website has a high bounce rate, search engines are going to penalize your pages because they think there’s obviously a reason why your visitors are leaving your pages quickly. By taking advantage of video marketing, it means your visitors are instantly attracted to the video and they’re going to stay on the site longer. This will, in turn, provide you with a lower bounce rate and you will be well rewarded with better SERPs in the long run. Contact a company like ClickIntelligence.com if you want to build links to help towards your SEO efforts.

Video marketing is excellent for those that can afford to go down that route. An 80% rise in conversions, better bounce rates, higher SERPs, and a helping hand to build trusting relationships are just some of the reasons why video marketing/production is one of the most powerful online tools there is.