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.