5 Reasons Why You Should Use Video Marketing

Today, seeing videos online is something second-nature in our lives. We are literally bombarded with new videos whether it be from traditional video sites like YouTube or Vimeo or more ordinary social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and even Pinterest. 

Whether we are deliberately seeking to watch a video or it's presented out in front of us, there's no denying that online videos are now everywhere. 

Clearly, video is the way to go and gain traction fast for internet marketers. However, using video marketing will not in itself guarantee any results unless it is adequately integrated with your brand's other marketing methods like social media, email and website. 

Fortunately, we have narrowed it down to primarily 5 reasons why you as a freelancer or as a brand/business should be using video marketing. 

1. Videos are processing by our brains faster than any other marketing method. As the brain processes visual cues faster than other senses by as much as 60,000 times more than text (see our other article on 10 Tips on How to Run Your Business Online in 2020), it pays marketers to use video over other methods simply because videos are more easily understood - coupled with the very short attention spans of today's internet audiences. 

10 Tips on How to Run Your Business Online in 2020

With the widespread availability of internet technologies and devices, it has never been easier for people to start a business with the drop of a hat. In fact, the majority of new businesses created (especially after the onset of COVID-19) have been online-based enterprises.

However, just because it's easier to start a business nowadays doesn't exactly translate into increased success. With increasing competition and rapidly changing technologies and protocols, successful businesses need to be constantly on their toes in order to stay ahead of the curve and survive. 

Fortunately, we have identified 10 tips on how you can run your online business in 2020 with the collaboration of GetResponse and Silicon Valley Girl.

1. Go Fully Remote

Now is perfect time to go fully remote and scale your business by a potentially unlimited factor. 

Harness amazing and free applications like Google and Bing search; blog tools like Blogger/Wordpress; social Media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and Webtalk; mail apps like Gmail or Proton Mail; communication and video apps like Zoom and ClickMeeting; and productivity apps like Slack and Asana to get your business organized and fully digital.

2. Simplify

No longer are entrepreneurs obligated to have a fully equipped team of marketers, salesman and developers looking after their online operations. 

Instead, they can do everything solo by using the power of technology and access professionally designed and ready-made templates and customizable landing pages to design their websites and campaigns. GetResponse is a great example of companies that provide such templates and development support.

3. Know Your Audience

In order to succeed as a business, you will need to precisely know the characteristics of your target audience - including knowing things like their demographics, location and the best time to contact them. Here, having a powerful analytics tool(s) will help you to significantly improve your targeting and sales funneling activities. 

4. Personalize and Give Them Personality

Related to tip 3, after you carefully identify who your audience is, it's time to personalize messages tailored for them.

This is achieved by setting up automated messages, auto-responders and chatbots all of which are increasingly becoming more common in today's digital marketing. 

5. Go Visual

As many of us are now well aware, visual cues generate the most response from any other form of output for marketing. 

Whether it be live videos, webinars, recorded video, photos, infographics and GIFs the options are massive and so is the potential to better engage with your audiences. 

6. Guide Customers to You

Depending on the needs of your business, chances are you will need some sort of funnel to achieve your goals.

If you are looking to increase leads, look for lead funnels. If you want to grow sales, choose sales funnels. And if you are seeking to build your online expertise through video, consider webinar funnels. 

7. Connect with Webinars

Webinars and live streams are increasingly becoming a popular method to spread your brand's message through the powerful medium of video.

There exist many different goals of webinars including monetization, upselling and cross-selling and as a powerful tool for content marketing.

8. Integrate with Ease

Instead of having to sort through and juggle between dozens of apps and software, it's suggested to integrate all your favourite apps under roof to improve the sharing of information, access data faster and serve as a one-stop hub for all your important applications. 

GetResponse has a wide range of available integrations with other major applications like Google Analytics, PayPal, Hubspot, Slack, Asana, Zapier, Zendesk and more.

9. Experiment and Evolve

Testing and trialing are key activities in carrying out your marketing activities. It's imperative to know what's working and what's not and which of your campaigns are getting the best type of response and engagement. 

A/B testing is especially important for social media marketing and email marketing as it helps your business to find out what the best ways are for attracting your audience and converting leads into sales.

10. Let Your Business Thrive Online

By combining all the tips mentioned above together, you will get a flexible, online-ready business that will be swift to respond to customers and market dynamics. 

In the next post, we'll be looking specifically into the power of video marketing and how it's changing the digital marketing landscape and forcing many companies to 'go video.' Till then, stay tuned!

Cheers, 

Red

How to Choose the Best Videoconferencing Software for You

With the development of modern tech innovations like faster transfer speeds, bandwidth, mobile applications and 4G connectivity, today more and more people have access to affordable videoconferencing/meeting software than ever.

This growth is usage of videoconferencing software has skyrocketed with the onset of COVID-19 (see our earlier post on COVID-19 and the Future of Work) with an explosion of new and varied users who would previously never even think about using such software to begin with. 

Previously, only businesses and government agencies would consume videoconferencing technologies in order to arrange meetings of teams who were spread out remotely in different locations. These technologies would often be of a paid nature and may also be encrypted or tethered to a VPN software (see How to Choose the Best VPN for You).

However, after the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, due to the impracticality of going to offices, more and more companies (including small businesses) decided to opt for virtual meeting applications out of necessity in order to arrange meetings with colleagues and teams to get work done. 

Soon after, a new segment appeared with schools and educational institutions also joining the fray and resorting to online videoconferencing and streaming in order to complete classes, labs and even examinations. Other new modalities emerged including doctor consultations, legal advising and even cases of marriages via videoconferencing making headlines over the past few months.

Most videoconferencing applications apart from having the standard audio/video streaming service, also provided features like video recording, webinars, API integrations and 3rd party functionalities, VPN and security options, cloud storage and multi-language support and transcriptions. 

Truly, the sky is the limit now for videoconferencing - especially considering the uncertain situation regarding COVID and how it may affect us further in the future. To make the decision easier for you, we have narrowed the best videoconferencing software down to 2 choices - one completely free and another paid. 

How to Rock Content Marketing

We've all heard of the age-old saying 'content is king.' As we've seen in our last few posts on developing sales funnels and developing effective leads, content marketing indeed plays a massive role in converting leads into paying customers and therefore improving the results of a business.

Content marketing is essentially a form of marketing focused on the creation of content online for a particular audience. Content marketing attracts leads and turns them into prospects and finally customers through the process of engaging them with valuable material which in turn provokes audiences to buy your company's goods and services.

The activity holds a number of important benefits including: creating sustainable brand loyalty, providing valuable information to audiences who will continue to revisit to consume more content and stimulate a willingness to buy your company's products and services. 

Probably, the most powerful differentiator of content marketing over older forms of marketing is the fact that it is a 'pull-based' strategy. This means that instead of going out of your way to reach out general consumers through ads, emails and phone calls (traditional 'push-based' methods), you are instead attracting consumers in your direction by sharing valuable content - Hubspot calls this inbound marketing (read more in our earlier post - The Wonders of Inbound Marketing). 

How to Develop Your Sales Funnel

As we've seen in our previous post describing lead generation, the first step to identifying leads and later converting them into prospects and then finally customers is to develop your sales funnel (in some contexts, also known as sales pipeline).

A sales funnel can be visually illustrated as an inverted pyramid where the biggest portion lies at the top of the aptly-named funnel. Like water pouring through, the current gets ever smaller and smaller until it peters out at the bottom.

In a similar way, a large quantity of general consumers in a market form the head of the funnel. It is up to the marketer to successfully guide the general consumer from awareness of the businesses product/service all the way down to the final purchase and staying with the business (customer loyalty/retention). In between, there are a number of steps that need to be taken prior to purchase including discovery of the product, evaluation of the product, intent to buy the product. 

More traditional marketing studies refer to the AIDA model. AIDA is an acronym standing for "Awareness, Interest, Desire and Action." It uses the same funnel shape as the diagram shown above with the main difference being that it is simpler to understand and contains fewer details. Also, there is no interlinking with the sales pipeline that can also be run parellel to the funnel.

How to develop an effective lead generation strategy

Lead generation is essentially all the activities relating to the identification and development of potential customers. Businesses use a range of tools through sales and marketing functions in order to generate leads and increase revenue for their enterprises. Without leads, businesses could not survive as their sales pipelines would eventually dry up. 

There exist distinct differences between B2C (business to consumer/retail marketing) and B2B (business to business/corporate marketing) lead generation. The most tangible difference is that B2C markets generally tend to be broad-based whereas B2B markets are more carefully segmented, with customers and competition tending to be more advanced and knowledgeable about products and services.

Lead generation encompasses a variety of different tactics include conducting detailed market research, developing the sales funnel (more on this in our next post), carefully managing your social media channels (through effective social media management), maintaining your website and pages (namely your landing page, product pages and call to action) and keeping your viewers hooked and wanting more through effective content marketing through blogs, social media snippets and e-mail newsletters.

In order to develop an effective lead generation strategy, you will have to have a keen understanding of how the sales funnel works and how to convert a general consumer in your target segment into a lead who steadily converts from a 'cold' lead to a 'hot' lead and eventually a customer of your business.

COVID and the Future of Work

The ongoing global pandemic has ravaged the way people work and do business. Previous public gatherings, meetings, office parties and social celebrations have all but been binned indefinitely owing to the disruptions caused by COVID-19. As businesses and workers scramble to adjust to the 'new normal,' we will explore what the future entails for work in the current environment as well as what is to come in the days ahead.

The previous 'normal' involved a great deal of social interaction and community. Business owners, managers and employees would make it a habit to spend as much time physically in their office rooms, desks and cubicles to show others their loyalty and dedication to their work. 'Working hard' meant putting in extra effort and time to the office in order to excel and climb the corporate ladder or scale the business to new heights.

After the widespread dispersion of the novel COVID-19 in January 2020, slowly but surely, businesses and society in general began feeling the adverse effects of the virus to not just their operations but how they go about their daily lives. Restrictions on when to leave homes, where you are allowed to go and what you are supposed to wear all became too much of a nightmarish reality for much of the global population which suddenly saw themselves locked under house arrest to try to contain the spread of the virus.

This resulted in a massive paradigm shift in the WoW (way of working) for most businesses and their employees. Now, stuck in their homes, people were forced to connect online and start working remotely using their laptops, mobiles and other devices to make sure they stayed up-to-date with the latest news and developments affecting their companies. Previously uncommon concepts like "work from home" and "remote working" suddenly became the rage and the expected standard for businesses large and small.

How to Choose the Best VPN for You

Nowadays, the use of VPN (virtual private networks) to connect to the internet has become commonplace. Just a few years ago, there was a time when only government agencies, large corporations and professional programmers would use VPNs to securely browse the confines of the internet.

Today, due to the huge supply and variety of VPNs available in the market owing to widespread internet use and technological availability, consumers now have a nearly virtually unlimited supply of options to choose from - both paid and free.

Basically, VPNs function as extra networks in between a normal networked connection between a client and server providing additional functionality, security and in many cases, more encryption. The technology uses various tunneling protocols to encrypt online connections allowing IP addresses to be disguised or altered.

The true origin of VPN even to this day remains a topic of debate. The majority of sources credit the discovery of the innovation to then Microsoft employee Gurdeep Singh-Pall who invented PPTP (Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol) in 1996 as a method of implementing a private network. By 1999, the specification was published to the general public and the technology was quickly adopted by government agencies and corporations to access data securely from remote locations. 

Currently, VPNs are most popularly used for such activities like circumventing geo-restrictions and censorship from their home countries and also to protect their personal identities and location from tracking websites and applications. 

With the pervasiveness of mobile devices, dozens of VPN services have cropped up over the years to cater specifically to mobile phone users. Additionally, browser-specific VPN extensions have also become very popular in recent years. 

To help you make an informed decision in choosing a VPN, we have shortlisted the best paid and free VPN in our opinion so you can start browsing right away more securely and anonymously!

Basics of Binary Options Trading

Binary options are basically financial products that provide a profit or loss depending on if a particular asset/option's price will go up or down. 

They are based on the options trading of securities conducted by large companies, banks, institutional investors and brokers who are daily transacting billions of dollars worth of options as a means of risk management and hedging. 

The simplicity of binary options is, you have essentially a 50/50 chance of making the right decision (ie a yes/no proposition) and all you need to do is identify if the particular asset you are trading is will be going up or down in price.  

The three basic types of options are high/low options where you predict whether the asset's price will end higher/lower as compared to the initial price; one-touch options that you decide will either go up or down; range/digital options where you determine which range the price will strike at.

"In the money" (ITM) refers to when the asset has a favorable strike price (price when the option is closed) relative to the current market price of the underlying asset. 

For example, you would have an ITM call/buy option when you buy an asset below the current market price. Conversely, you would have an ITM put option when you sell the asset above the current market price. In both cases, you would be making a gain from the price differential (however other factors like cost of buying the option and fees would also need to be considered).

At the time of the strike/expiration price, you need to make sure that the asset is on the "correct side" of the strike price in order to profit. The option is exercised when the stipulated time period - which can be as short as sixty seconds to as long as one month!

It's important to note that the outcome of  a binary option will either be a gain or a loss. Traders will either receive a fixed amount profit payout if the option expires in the money or they will incur a loss if it expires out of the money. 

The beauty of binary options, apart from the simple yes/no proposition, is that you can trade in a wide variety of assets ranging from currency pairs (forex), stock prices, cryptocurrency, gold, silver, oil, bonds, indices and also ETFs. 

It is quite possible to generate consistent returns of 80-90% or even more from your investment, but the caveat is that you will need to test out the best strategies for you in order to have the best chance of trading successfully to win more and lose less. 

That's why it's always a good idea to start trading using demo accounts in order to "test the waters" and make sure you don't lose any money at the outset.

We have narrowed down the 2 best binary options websites/platforms in the market where you can start trading instantly for free using demo accounts. Please be sure to thank us later on!

Email marketing revisited: Is it still worth it in 2020?

From the very origins of email, marketers have seen the potential of using the medium of email to spread their messages across and convert general audiences from mass consumers to specific customers of the company's products and services without any need to even leave their seats. 

Fast forward to the turn of the millennium with the development of faster internet speeds and 3G mobile communications heralding a 'golden age' for tech companies from San Francisco to Shanghai, companies found like never before how powerful email marketing could potentially be. An explosion of new companies emerged harnessing email along with ancillary support companies like internet marketing, search engine optimization and online consultancies. 

We previously discussed in an earlier post regarding the merits of email marketing (The Power of Email Marketing) and how it can be used to convert leads to actual customers in order to 'close' the sales funnel.

A few telling statistics from GetResponse recently reveals that despite what many think, email marketing is definitely not dead - rather, still as crucial as it was years ago.

Every day, 294 billion emails are sent daily - with Gmail by far being the dominator - with more than 425 million ACTIVE users. 

As for marketing products and services through email, an amazing 82% of respondents mentioned they opened mails from companies and spend 138% more than those who do not receive any promotional mails. Out of the same group, 44% mentioned that they purchased at least once from a promotional mail. 

The infographic mentions a few important pointers for companies and internet marketers to be cognizant of. Namely, you need to make your emails more engaging by limiting the word counts, 'spicing up' the subject line, personalizing the mails (ideally by actually mentioning the respondent's name!), and using the correct keywords and time slots for email sending.

You should also be aware of applying certain psychological devices like using odd numbers, question numbers, personal pronouns (you, your), percentages and scarcity.

Lastly, your aim should be to get your mailing list to actually read and respond to your messages by making your messages as short and to the point as possible, compatible with smartphone/tab screen viewing and always aim for a personal touch to your emails to be as "human" as possible!

The bottom line is that email marketing remains a staple of most online (and even offline) companies' budgets despite the prominence of more "softer" methods of inbound marketing which leverage the power of pull marketing attracting customers towards the company rather than the other way around.

Review: Leveraging Leverage

Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.

- Archimedes

This is the first post on this blog in ages. Already I feel like I'm fighting off the spider webs that have amassed since we've been gone!

During our sojourn, we've done a lot of soul searching and gone through that 'midlife crisis' phase only to return back to our origin - that is, writing about freelancing and marketing. We will also start to write more about other topics too - including personal finance, economics and self development. 

Our first article on this new arena will be an e-book review on the book 'Leveraging Leverage' which is available at Amazon Kindle. We have always been staunch believers of personal development and aggressively watch the latest YouTube videos on anything having to remotely deal with self improvement and gain. That's why when we read this book, we felt it touched a nerve and really connected with us in another level.

Without getting into too much detail, the premise of this book is quite simple - since the dawn of civilization, humans have always strived to use the concept of leverage wherever they could - from inventing the first manual levers to lift heavy objects otherwise impossible to carry - to devising complex but convenient financial tools like mortgages, margin trading and IPOs - all in an effort to harness the power of leverage. 

After a long time, Frontier Freelancing is finally back!

It has been a long time coming. Strangely, we have COVID-19 to thank us for getting 'back on the saddle' and writing again due to the extra free time.

Keep on the lookout for fresh content touching on all areas of freelancing, marketing and general business in the coming days!

Till then, we wish you all safety and security in these challenging times!

Best Regards,

Red