By now, everyone knows what Instagram is – the social media platform that enable its users to take pictures and short videos and share them in the app (and on multiple other platforms as well, but that is a completely different blog for another day). Nevertheless, a new day is on the rise… Instagram is not only hashtags and pretty pictures. Over the last few years, the app has evolved from a teenage forum where girls would hit like when their BFF uploaded yet another selfie, to becoming a platform of huge potential revenue when it comes to all sorts of business.
As of now, Instagram drives sales with a high average in orders, and according to Shopify, Instagram referrals actually results in an average order value of $65, which is second only to Polyvore’s $66.75. Even though most visits will not end up resulting in a purchase, the ones that do, will result in considerably higher revenue than other social networks –take for example YouTube’s $37.63 average order value. Another major piece of the puzzle is the number of active users, and seeing as the user base for Instagram in India alone is estimated to be almost 6 million active mobile users every month the question should no longer be “should your company have an Instagram Handle”, but rather “how do you maximize your income through your Instagram”? E-commerce, Fashion, Real Estate, Hospitality, Medical Care… you name it, every single industry can profit from Instagram, when used correctly. Read on, and we will make sure that you are fully prepared to dive into the ocean of endless possibilities by teaching you how to leverage Instagram to build relations that ultimately can help to drive conversion with this unique social media platform.
Just like the key to any good fairy tale is to start it off with “once upon a time” and end it with “and they lived happily ever after”, the key to crack the Instagram code, is your pictures. They are easier to digest than text, and they are more effective for evoking emotions, which will enhance the chances that your message will be remembered. When it comes to visuals on social, Instagram is supreme. You want to use images that drives sales, and studies show the first real data on Instagram’s capability to drive sales and perhaps more important, the essentials of a picture that boosts sales conversions. The University of Wisconsin conducted a study and learned valuable insights, which we are more than happy to share with you. Here follows a list, in random order, of what their study showed was important when it comes to what type of pictures that drives sales:
This knowledge can be seen as somewhat of a hurdle for some, since the elements that used to inspire engagement (likes and comments) are not the same as the ones that now trigger sales conversions. No need to worry though, this simply means that one must now use a mix of criteria when creating Instagram photos.
You can use multiple tools for Instagram including some focussed on e-commerce.
Posting user generated content is one of the most powerful ways to boost the credibility of your company. As consumers, we tend to perceive content originating from our peers as being authentic, because we trust that the everyday community has less of a vested interest in making a corporation look god compared to its employees. Keep in mind that consumer decision making is not always driven by price or quality, but in fact, a lot of consumers choose brands they associate with a lifestyle that sits well with them.
For example, if you buy a BMW, you are not just buying a car, you are buying into a lifestyle. Visual user generated content, which basically is the foundation Instagram is built on, is all the more impactful, as it allows us to see products being used in real-life situations, which again makes it easier for us to imagine ourselves using these products or services. So re-post your followers content if it aligns with yours, because not only does this help to create a bond with the consumer through shared interests, it also portraits the product in real life. The emotional bond that is created when using UGC is exactly why ads with this content converts better on Instagram than the refined studio shots created by professionals.
Another very important tool to use is to leverage the reach of influencers on instagram. It is a known fact that consumers are more likely to trust a recommendation from friends and family as opposed to a brand or a vendor. This is why it is good business for companies to use social media Influencers and user generated content to get the word out about their product, offer, service or whatever they wish to convey to their online audience. Influencer marketing has the power to drive sales, sign ups and app installs by using links and promotion codes which can be tracked. Tracking and analysing the data and ‘Call Per Click’ are numbers that are going to help you modify your spend in order to generate revenue from Instagram. Instagram also its own analytics tool now.
Determine what metrics you care to track and make sure you keep a weekly or maybe a monthly report to monitor your progress. You also have to take advantage of targeting since Instagram now has the same targeting, creative and measurement abilities as Facebook. It is up to you to use the features and get the best possible results from your Instagram ads and campaigns.
Brands are excited about the success they have seen with website conversion ads on Instagram and the potential the platform has to offer –and quite frankly, so are we! Tell us what has been your experience in using Instagram. Click here to continue reading blog articles around Instagram.
For a fashion brand to be successful, the people behind it must understand, they are not just selling a product, they are selling an entire lifestyle! This has become increasingly easier to convey to the customers, since social media made their entrance. The use of social media in the fashion retail industry is on the rise, because of visual channels like Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest and YouTube, simply because image is what these brands are selling.
Creating a solid, quality social media following should be a big part of any brand’s social media strategy and these channels are providing the perfect platforms for engaging with users, in order to raise brand awareness, drive website traffic and generate sales. With this in mind, we present seven ways to leverage social media for your fashion business.
A platform like Instagram is perfect for a lot of things; including sharing ‘behind the scenes’ pictures for your brand, like major fashion house Chanel or Dolce & Gabbana does. This will make your followers identify with your brand on a more personal level, and that makes them more likely to choose your brand next time. It also portraits a certain lifestyle, to which the consumer wants to belong, and again is more likely to choose your product.
To know more about how to use Instagram for your business.
When it comes to fashion on social media, one of the great things is that your followers will often create a lot of content for you, and it is right there for the taking! User-generated content works like word of mouth endorsement, with the users advertising your brand by sharing photos of themselves wearing your products. These posts, ofcourse reach the followers and provides free advertisement for your brand, but even more important, you can also share these pictures from your own platform, which not only makes the user feel valued, but further more provides any potential customer with an even more relatable post. Companies like Calvin Klein and Nike has some dedicated followers, who always posts their brand.
If you have yet to build up a strong group of followers, that automatically posts pictures of your products and tags you in it, you can consider running a campaign, that urges people to compete in posting their favorite outfit (including your brand, of course!), giving them a chance to win a price from you.
In today’s world where people believe people more than brands, Influencer marketing has become the most effective way of advertising. Over the time, many brands from different sectors and industries have shifted their marketing strategy to influencer marketing. Tie-ups with popular influencers help brands reach the right target audience.
Craftsvilla a well- known e-commerce fashion brand achieved great results through influencer marketing. The brand did a campaign with famous fashion influencers across different social media platforms. Neha, one of the fashion influencers shared her experience with crafts villa on her blog and other platforms titled ’Embrace the ethnic wear this season with craftsvilla.’ This post on Instagram received great amount of engagement from her followers.
If you have not explored influencer marketing its time you leveraged this option. So, go ahead and try it out today!
According to recent statistics, India has around 8.19 million Pinterest users. It is one of the fastest growing social platforms and allows users to save pins and create boards with anything from DIY projects to wedding ideas and fashion tips. Many fashion brands have used this platform successfully. It is a good idea for brands to explore Pinterest more.
Pinning just your products every time might make it monotonous for your users, hence, sharing some ideas or content related to the industry will be a great idea to increase engagement.
Gehna, one of India’s leading jewelry brands has over 5,000 followers on Pinterest. The brand has created boards belonging to different categories based on occasions and festivals. This is an interesting way to showcase your products. It makes it easy for followers to pin jewelry that they like directly from the category they are looking for.
For more tips on how you can use Pinterest, find out here.
Videos are always more engaging than just images. Video options are available in every social media channel today, be it Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, YouTube, etc. Top Fashion brands are using videos as a promotion tool. You can showcase your products, take your audience behind the scenes, live stream a fashion show, etc., which in turn will drive more engagement to your page.
Free people, a fashion brand from the US has leveraged the videos feature on snapchat to connect with their target audience. Since the brand caters to the current generation, they decided to reach them through a medium that is most used by them, which is Snapchat. The employees, take their fans behind the scenes by giving them tours of the showroom, models during photo shoots, etc. The brand also connected with their fans on a personal level through a campaign called “Question Wednesdays”where snappers can personally snap their questions to the brand’s snapshot account. They even ask snappers personal and friendly questions. The overall involvement and engagement through Snapchat that Free People provides users ultimately creates a valued and elite relationship for the user.
Snapchat is one platform that needs to be explored for your business. Check out how you can use snapchat for your business here.
Reach a wider set of audience by targeting the right audience through your Facebook or Instagram ads. Instagram has proven to be the most appropriate and a successful platform for any fashion brand to leverage. Create and place ads with visually appealing creatives on Instagram with a Shop now or Buy no call to action button.
Fossil, created a look by putting together products that would appeal to their target segment and at the same time communicate their brand’s personality. They did this through an Instagram ad in which they used a very attractive image with a call to action button and also added a quirky caption.
Customer service is always key to any business. It is essential to make sure your customers are happy with your products and services. With social media you can do this by responding to their comments, queries, messages or tweets as quickly as possible. Also, ensure you come across as fun and exciting. People on social media do not want to interact with anything that is monotonous or dull.
Another way of making customer experience a delight would be by easing the process of shopping. With the introduction of social shopping, brands can use this feature to reduce the purchase process. Facebook shop is one of the best ways to do so. So, go ahead and leverage this feature for your brand today!
So, what are you waiting for? Go ahead and explore all these tips and tools today! Find the right one that will suit your business and make the best use of it.
- Other contributor to this blog is Stine
Facebook Marketing has become an integral part of any digital marketing strategy and it has revolutionized the way we look at the online marketing industry. Over the last 12 years, Facebook has seen a 360-degree shift, transforming from a simple social networking site to the face of a multi-billion dollar company allowing brands to find new customers, increase their sales, create brand awareness and much more. When we ran an industry survey amongst CMOs and Brand Heads across India we found that close to 90% Brands in India are already leveraging Facebook. Advertisers are spending more money than ever before on Facebook as it has emerged as one of the biggest platforms to engage with their target audience. Keeping this in mind, new features are being regularly added to Facebook and marketers have to constantly make alterations to their strategies to ensure their content is still reaching its target audience. Below are a few points that have been gathered keeping in mind the recent changes which may give us clues as to what 2017 will hold for both consumers and businesses. You may also find it interesting to read our book on Digital Marketing Insights for 2017, which can be purchased on Amazon.
Following the decrease in the organic reach of Facebook page posts last year, Locowise conducted a small study to analyze how page posting frequency impacts reach, engagement and negative feedback.
The study reveals that pages that posted once a week or less on their official page reached an average of 15% of the audience who liked their page per post. Interestingly, pages that posted two to four times a week reached only 10% of the page audience and pages that posted once a day reached a lower average of 8.42% per post. This means that organic reach drops with an increase in the number of posts, and over posting content is a common mistake marketers tend to make on FB. This also means that the quality of content and FB posts needs to be extremely high and we are likely to see many brands evolving into fewer but highly engaging posts.
Another study by social@ogilvy reveals that for large pages with more than 5,00,000 Likes, the organic reach has seen a remarkable decline when compared to other smaller pages. It is believed that marketing managers can expect the organic reach to further approach zero in the future. The detailed analysis and data interpretations along with the recommendations are available to read here in the full white paper.
The number of users on Facebook has doubled from 845 million to 1654 million over the last five years. There are more brands than ever who are joining the bandwagon of Facebook marketing and these brands are posting multiple posts every day. All of this creates more noise and unimaginable amounts of content that will simply be filtered out and never reach the news feed of a specific user. With so much information to be filtered, Facebook uses complex algorithms to pick and show content to users they are most relevant to them and those that they are most likely to engage with.So it can be assumed that increased brand post frequency is aiding in the drop of organic reach.
However, the only exception to this organic reach debate was seen in the news & media industry. The organic reach of news publishers seems to remain steady, even with a higher posting frequency. Here’s the result of analysis of 3,318 profiles, by Sotrender.
Videos are the next step in the social media evolution and will most likely dominate the online advertising and marketing industry. As per the stats by Facebook, users watch an average of 100 million hours of video every day and most of these are on their mobile devices. Daily views have increased from 1 billion to 8 billion in the last one year. These stats are proof that users have started consuming more of video content and it is essential that brands leverage this in their favor to engage with the potential customers. Video content is the best medium for storytelling and is a great opportunity for brands to connect with their audience.
Live videos were one of the major updates announced earlier this year by Facebook. This gave live videos prime placement in the Facebook app and also adds new ways to find, create, share, and react to them. This move efficiently makes live videos one of the central features of Facebook. Live videos offer a new way to interact on a platform that can feel so familiar that it risks feeling stale. Broadcasting live to your social circle gives you a certain thrill or even just watching a friend’s live broadcast, can bring in a fresh feeling of excitement and make you want to interact on the same old platform in a new way. On an average, Facebook says people are commenting 10 times more on live videos than they do on regular videos. This clearly means that brands must explore Live videos over recorded videos as this would help drive higher engagement levels with the audience. Facebook also rolled out an update where advertisers could add a video element for FB Carousel Ads. The shift towards video as a tool for marketing is evident and is definitely here to stay.
We also have an interesting blog on how to create low cost videos to tell your brand story – in case you are creating videos for the first time.
The fact that a business needs to have a mobile-friendly website is much talked about and is not a new concept. Last year, Google announced that, for the first time mobile searches surpassed desktop searches. This eventually led to a new situation where Google’s algorithm started to penalize sites that were not optimized for mobile devices. For the last few years, marketing experts have been stressing on the fact that there is an obvious need for businesses to optimize the sites for the ever-increasing number of mobile users. Facebook Inc announced that it has over 142 million users in India, of which about 133 million access the social network via their mobile devices. This means that a staggering 90% of users are using facebook on their phones in India. It is essential that marketers who are trying to engage with and attract potential customers in order to redirect them to their website, ensure that their website is mobile optimized and are able to leverage every micro moment of Indian consumers. In today’s Smartphone era, mobile-optimization is the norm and an essential item that can no longer be placed on the back burner to address later.
A few years ago, advertising on social media platforms was a very niche concept with not too many players in the market. In this new age of online marketing, many brands have become aware of the importance of ads across various social media channels, especially Facebook. Today, with the various targeting and advertising options on Facebook, we can reach out to millions of potential customers in any part of the world. Facebook advertising is a strong tool that can be used by brands to meet their marketing objectives.
Facebook ads allow you to choose from a wide range of possible adverts including but not restricted to Page Post Engagement, Clicks to a website, Conversions on Website, App Installs, Video Views, Lead Ads etc. Over the last few years, Facebook has evolved into a paid marketing platform more than an organic one so it is essential for marketers to leverage the power of the various adverts available. You can read our detailed guide on measuring ROI from social media.
In an attempt to make it easier for brands to reach out to potential customers and drive sales on mobile devices Facebook has started rolling out the Shop section in phases. This section allows a brand to list out their products and let consumers browse through the catalog and purchase products that they like from within Facebook. The social network does not charge you to add a shop section to your Page nor does it take any percentage of the money you make through it. In the upcoming year, more businesses will start selling stuff directly from Facebook as this new section is set to change the way we look at e-commerce and social selling. Ofcourse it also has had Product Ads for E-commerce companies for a long time now – these can be also be leveraged parallely.
We have left out Instagram Marketing from this conversation, as it warrants its own blog. We are also seeing some interesting developments around Instagram analytics and Instagram targeting going forward.
Do let us know what other features you expect FB to evolve in the coming months.
According to HT Digital and IMRB Report (India) on “Student online behavior,” 93% of students access the Internet every day and 73% of students use the mobile phone. Nearly 91% access the internet to collect information about colleges and courses. Thus, going online for universities and colleges has become inevitable. Although this calls for investments in creating digital assets, building strategies and online advertising, the costs are quickly realized, easy to the track and attributable. The ROI is much higher in comparison to any traditional mediums used.
The following are 7 ways that universities and colleges can use digital medium in India.
A good website is a blend of three elements, namely aesthetics, functionality, and ease of use. A website is a very strong representation of any brand on the internet. The three elements are elaborated below
A well-designed website for a University or college needs to address the following factors-
The functionality of the website is what determines the final design aspects, these have to be defined ahead, and some of them are listed below
Unless a website is not created with the end user in mind, it will fail to give the results that it had intended to achieve. It has to be “easy to use” and intuitive. The following are key aspects to keep in mind. These aspects may not be always set right a 100%, but a study of user behavior over a period of time can help better these aspects
Developing a mobile version of the website is also a great way to boost the recruitment of students, as today many young people have access to a smartphone or mobile device. Also, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a key to drive organic traffic to the website, without traffic there is no point of having a website. The SEO will drive students/parents looking for relevant courses and information to the website.
Colleges and Universities must use social media to engage with current/ prospective students and parents. They should use social media to connect in a proactive manner, by engaging and demonstrating that the institution cares for its stakeholders. Content built with the right balance of words and visuals is well received and attractive to target audience. Several channels such as Facebook, Linkedin, YouTube, Twitter and new age channels such as Instagram can be tapped to achieve various goals. A mix of content and imagery
Social listening enables universities and colleges to proactively listen to the students and their concerns across platforms. These tools can be used to build solutions to serve the students/ parents. Many universities in the west use twitter tools to engage with students and the community. Also, intercepting prospective/ current student conversations and directing them to the right information in real time/ quickly helps build a lasting impression about the educational institution
Digital advertising can be used to drive admissions, reach out for campus placements and to improve visibility the in the short term on search engines. Digital Ads can be placed across the Google network and on social media, i.e. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and can be targeted and optimized to reach the right audience. In the current generation, the students rarely use the traditional press for information gathering and hence making any spends primarily on digital ads makes more sense. The ROI is both traceable and visible, making every penny spent, accounted.
Well-designed mailers serve two primary purposes for a college/university. A mailer is a personal touch-point with the receivers and hence,
Students are constantly looking for information to further their study and careers, much in advance of them even graduating from schools. They use the internet to help them prepare better for tests, chose educational institutions or look for career guidance. A University / college can plug into this requirement and serve as a thought leader in the educational space, thereby adding value to their branding. Blogs are a good way to attract prospective students and also improve search rankings on Google.
It is a humongous task to have prospective applicants and current students pay fees and make other payments over bank counters. A college/university website can integrate this functionality into their website and increase application conversions as well as ensure compliance of fee and other payments on time by students. The website and Social Media can also be used to communicate deadlines periodically for the same purpose.
Need more insights on how to educate the younger generation on building a career and making it big in life? Subscribe to our YouTube channel Arrear Irundalum Career for handy tips and tricks on making the right choice. You can also check out our Arrear Irundalum Career website for more information on career guidance tips in Tamil.
Going digital for University/College is not a decision anymore; it is just a “Must”. It is not what needs to be done, but “how to do it” that will make one university/college differentiate from the rest. It is important therefore to set the key USPs and define measurable goals before building a strategy and making expenses on the digital assets and advertisements.
A picture speaks a thousand words, a phrase that we are all familiar with. Snapchat, a social media messaging app proves this phrase right. Similar to Instagram, Snapchat allows users to share pictures and videos for a set amount of time with friends after which the picture self-destructs. It was launched by Evan Spiegal and Bobby Murphy in the year 2011. It is widely popular amongst the teens and young adults and this trend is starting to gain momentum amongst the other generations as well. At Social Media Week’s around the world, Snapchat has become an increasingly discussed topic.
The Snapchat app is available on both google play and app store. Begin by downloading this app.
Source: Hubspot.com
Once you have downloaded the next step is to sign up. Set up your account by entering your email, a username, and a password. However, it is advisable to choose a good username since Snapchat unlike other apps, does not allow you to change your user name once you set it.
Account settings: Adjust your privacy settings. To do this, click on the ghost icon above on the screen. This will lead you to the settings tab in which you can choose who can view your snaps and stories.
Profile picture: Snapchat lets you set an animated profile picture. Tap on the ghost icon on the top of your screen and click on your snapcode and then upload a picture of your brand.
Now that you are all set, it's time to connect with your friends. To add a new friend, click on the ghost icon and then say add friends, this lets you add customers or brand well-wishers either from your address book or by username or snapcode. You can also add fans by location.
To share a snap with your fans, open the camera and click on the circle button present on the screen below. You can also shoot a video for which you would have to press and hold the button a little longer. You can also enhance the snap by adding filters, texts and images on it.
The latest Snapchat version offers you a variety of lenses that are fun to experiment with. To use this, click and press on the screen, this would allow it to capture the shape of your face. Once this is done different lenses appear and you can choose and try different ones by scrolling left.
After you are done, you can send the snap by tapping the arrow in the bottom left side of the screen.
A snap story can be viewed by everyone on your friends/fans list. You can add multiple snaps and videos and this stays for twenty-four hours.
Follow the same steps as creating a snap, except instead of choosing few people to send it to, you need to choose ‘my story’ to post this.
This feature on the app allows you to video chat with your fans. To start a video chat, click on the video button present below the chat tab. This can be an interesting way to showcase a new product launch or to talk about a new/interesting development with your brand.
Source: www.wired.com
Snapchat has different emojis next to your contacts to denote the different levels of friendships which is based on your snap chat activity. Be careful while using this for your brand as these emojis also need to represent the tone of not just your brand but the message being amplified.
Source: askmen.com
Snapchat is one of the fastest-growing social networks. This medium helps you to come up with some fun, engaging and creative campaigns. The app’s features like filters, geo-filters, adding text, emojis, etc adds the element of fun to snaps. Many brands have begun to use Snapchat as a part of their marketing strategy. Wondering how you can use Snapchat for your business? Here are few ways you can:
If your business is hosting or a part of an event, use this app to cover all the live happenings at the event. This way your audience members will be able to view your event live, no matter where they are.
Channel, MTV, created a live story during the VMAS, where they were updating snaps live from the event. They received around 12 million views on this platform. All the fans, no matter where they were, could view everything that happened at the award show. Watch this video here:
Take your fans behind the scenes. This is a great way to engage with your audience and get them excited. Capture some fun moments at work, like celebration or team lunch, etc. Experiment by using all the features of this app. This gives the users a different experience from what they would get from other social media platforms which in turn will make them want to engage with your brand on this platform.
Once the users get a glimpse of what is going on behind the scenes it will make them feel that they are a part of an overall process.
Just like other social platforms like twitter and Facebook, you can host fun and exciting contests on Snapchat. You can use this medium to provide the promo code for a sale that is happening in your store or website. This is a part of the shopping trend and seemed to have worked well with a few of the brands.
In today’s world, influencer marketing is one of the popular ways to reach a wide target audience. Tie up with influencers that have a high Snapchat score and a good number of followers on other social media platforms as well. Influencers who are avid Snapchat users will know ways to make the content even more interesting by using all the features of the app. Disney world hired Mike Platco who’s personal account gets close to 120,000 views per snap, as an influencer when they launched their Snapchat account. Mike is a great story teller as well as an artist and he utilized these skills of his on his snaps around the theme park.
Source: http://www.socialmediatoday.com/
Launching a new product? Create a buzz around it and get your fans excited and geared up for your product launch. Give them a sneak- peek or a preview of the new product.
Apart from product launch, many brands make use of this platform to give a demo of their products.
Burberry leveraged this medium to feature their new collection before the actual show early this year. This way the brand was able to increase the engagement with its fans by getting them geared up and excited for the actual show.
Source: www.postano.com
Create and add Geo filters for your brand. Sponsored geo filters work well for many brands. Since this lets you add your logo or anything specific onto the filters. Sponsored lense is another interesting way to engage the audience. This helps in terms of branding as well.
Beats, the famous headphones company used the sponsored lense to promote their black Friday sale. Users were able to add the lense over their photo to create funny videos in which the user’s eyes would get wide and their heads would move back and forth.
If you are not using Instagram or snapchat for your business, you are missing out on something! So go ahead and start exploring ways to leverage this platform.
Who doesn’t love a good story? We, humans are inherent suckers for good stories. They make us feel happy, sad, motivated, joyous, angry and the way they touch us and impact our thoughts, nothing else can. There is a reason why we spend hours binge-watching series, or why we watch movies or bury ourselves in books. All of these mediums have one thing in common – stories! It’s all around us.
Storytelling is a very powerful communication tool and is probably the best way to build a brand. Brands that have made a mark and who stand apart today have been successful in telling their stories in the most unique manner. There is also an art to storytelling and when done right it can help you get exceptionally good results!
We are all aware of the classic ways of storytelling through words and images. Today, however, the trend has shifted towards videos. This holds true especially when applied to digital marketing. Videos are more powerful than simple imagery and are super illustrative; they are also easily memorable and allow creating a stronger bond between the brand and the audience.
Videos in digital marketing can prove to be extremely powerful & worthwhile for both brands and consumers. A lot of effort goes into conceptualizing & producing a video and it can prove to be quite costly. But today, there are a lot of ways in which you can create good quality videos with a low budget.
1. Opt for short videos to convey your message – Short videos go well with our hectic lives and concise attention spans. Also 70% of the smartphone users are consuming content via their mobile devices while they’re on the go, thus, the crisper & briefer the content, the better it is. Youtube is not the only video-embracing platform available online. There is no dearth of video-centric platforms and 90% of these platforms are famous for hosting short-form videos. Instagram, Vine and many other channels today host videos including Facebook & Twitter. The world’s first Instagram trailer was released back in 2013 for the movie Jobs which was a 15 second packed video with dramatic music, slow-motion shots of Ashton Kutcher reciting inspiring dialogs about eccentric, misfit rebels. It's almost like the first full theatrical trailer for the movie, except shorter.
Creating short-form videos is all about how creative you can get in less than a minute. These videos are streamed to viewers on a range of platforms that increases the reach exponentially. They are also far more successful and have wider reach because they are “snackable” in nature and easier to consume and producing them costs far lesser than creating a long video.
2. Smartphones are the best chattels–It’s not necessary to film a video with the help of high-end equipment & lights. Your best asset is in your pocket – your smartphone. As a brand, it might come across as a ridiculous idea but it actually is a very cost-effective & quick way of creating videos. It is not necessary to get engulfed in creating huge budget videos. You can convey your story through an excellent video shot on your smartphone or tablet (of course with a good quality camera)
3. Your script is paramount –The script plays a huge role in the video as well. The content should be clear and precise with no ambiguity. The video holds no power if the visuals are perfect and the content is lacking. Both are of great importance. Thus, make sure you get your script right first. If you choose to outsource the production of a video inclusive of the conceptualization, it will cost you a substantial amount of money. However, if you decide to prepare the script beforehand then it might save you time & money. There are also affordable marketplaces from where you can subcontract video productions and these come at a remarkably low cost.
4. Affordable online marketplaces – The internet is a great place to find the solution for your woes, and this case is no different. There are some really affordable marketplaces like Fiverr.com that has professionals from all over the world who can help create the video of your choice at really affordable prices starting from 5$. All you have to do is describe how you want your video to be and they’ll get it done for you within a matter of 24-48 hours. The system is commendable and you get what you seek for at really good rates.
5. DIY Videos – However, if you do not wish you outsource your videos then there is also an option to create your own videos with readily available online tools. Even beginners can create videos like a pro! Example of such websites include Videoscribe, Animoto, Sparkol. With Videoscribe and Sparkol you can create amazing whiteboard style animation videos. Animoto is inclined towards servicing users who are looking for a really simple way to create a video. All you need to do is select images and upload them with soundtracks provided by the tool.
With these tips, you can surely make the right impression with your videos. To make an amazing video all you need is an idea, a good script and the right tools. Gone are the days where we had to buy expensive video equipment! With the development of technology, you can create the perfect video for your brand at an affordable rate!
For more tips on how to rank your videos, read our in-depth article: YouTube SEO Tips: The Secret Sauce to Ranking Your Videos in 2019.
Online Reputation Management has become an integral part of any brand’s digital strategy, as the online consumer base is constantly growing. According to a recent survey, 70% of Indians online prefer or have used Social Media for customer service or purchase recommendations at least once. With more and more consumers actively sharing and looking out for information online, it becomes crucial for brands to have a successful ORM strategy in place.
It is the process of managing and improving your brand's reputation through positive content promotion and prompt redressal of consumer complaints and grievances online. This customer-centric approach ensures credibility and helps monitor the brand sentiment online. In order to maintain a positive brand image, businesses need to constantly monitor conversations around their brand and the industry across social media, community forums, review sites, blogs and all over the internet. There are ORM tools available to track, analyse and manage online content, thereby making it easy for brands to streamline the process and carryout quality checks frequently.
Understanding how Online Reputation Management can impact your brand identity and business objectives is important, no matter how big or small the enterprise is. Here are some pointers on the key aspects of ORM can make or break your brand:
• Listen or Lose: Knowing what your customers are talking about your business online is very crucial for customer retention and acquiring new prospects. Majority of the consumers today refer to reviews and recommendations on various sites and social media platforms before making a purchase decision. Witnessing negative feedback about your service or product online can lead to distrust and drop in sales.
Hence, a timely response system needs to be in place to address customer grievances not just on social media, but also on review portals and forums that can show up on the Google Search results.
• Respond to Regain Trust: One of the most common mistakes that brands make when it comes to Online Reputation Management is deleting or avoiding a customer complaint. Covering up an issue is never a solution, as customer stories tend to have a greater reach and impact. Consumers appreciate public signs of transparency and honesty; hence always respond to negative comments and take the issue offline if needed.
When the issue is resolved promptly, there are higher chances of this troubled customer turning into a brand evangelist and post positive feedback about the brand’s approach and customer service. To know how you can efficiently track and respond to feedback on social media, see our detailed blog.
• Be Quick to Acknowledge Feedback: According to an average Internet user, a brand needs to respond to a consumer’s query or feedback online within 30 minutes or an hour. Prompt response with a relevant solution goes a long way in showing consumers that you are listening to them. It’s also one of the easiest ways to win back your customer’s trust and let them know you value them.
If you are unsure about something, it is always better to inform your customers that you are looking into the issue and will get in touch shortly regarding the corrective action. Because, more the time taken to respond, severe the damage is. If you are a B2C brand where the consumer engagement rate is high, opt for ORM tools that can help you streamline this process.
• Climb the Search Engine Ladder: There are close to 91 Million searches performed on Google each day. How many of those do you think could be about your brand? Big or small, leverage on SEO to make positive content dominate the Google Search results and push down the negative references about your brand. Promoting fresh, useful and positive content on various web pages about your brand can help in outranking negative comments over a period of time.
Most brands also take an integrated approach to effectively use Influencer Marketing in order to create positive word-of-mouth. This includes creation of blogs or reviews across community platforms, online review portals and social media.
• Customer Delight Made Easy: Being available online and making customer interactions meaningful helps in exceeding their expectations. A happy customer likes to share positive experiences and eventually becomes a brand loyalist. Businesses in the servicing industry can take the ORM route to dominate the competitive marketplace and demonstrate their trustworthiness & commitment to customers.
In order to achieve this, brands need to actively track brand mentions and follow conversations online to respond and initiate conversations. Being proactive not only helps to keep negative sentiments at bay, but also helps in building a positive brand perception.
• Establish your Brand Personality: Even though most brands are online and making efforts to improve customer experience, only few stand out. A unique approach towards addressing concerns and encouraging conversations helps in building the brand and differentiating yourself from the competitors. Online Reputation Management also serves as an opportunity to showcase your brand persona and cultivate a social media voice that will amaze your consumers.
Being witty and creative is one of the easiest ways to get noticed and make an impact on digital media platforms. Below is an example of Ola’s quirky response to a customer.
Online Reputation Management could be the missing piece in your digital strategy if you’re looking to create a difference and delight customers, but not there yet. Have you deployed effective ORM strategies for your brand and witnessed how it’s making or breaking your brand? Do write to us in the ‘Comments’ section.
Analytics is by far one of the most important tools to help a company sell on the social media platform. Yes, driving traffic to the website is equally important, but how do you find out what happens after that? That is where web and social media analytics comes to play. Every social networking site has its own set of analytics that are both accurate and user-friendly. While Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest has inbuilt analytics, Instagram was lacking in it. Though Instagram shares the same ad platform as Facebook, the platform does not yet have an analytics tool like Facebook’s Insights and Audience Insights. Fortunately, there are a number of third-party Instagram analytics tools available for businesses and marketers to measure their marketing efforts until recently when Instagram announced its insights feature – Instagram ‘Business Tool’that will be made available directly in the app for its users!
While this happened, Instagram again made heads turn for yet another new launch – ‘Business Profiles’. This tool is truly an advantage for small businesses, which can enjoy the ease of mobile marketing on Instagram which will also help reduce the gap between the consumers and the brands. While Instagram’s carousal ad sets and videos have already been helpful for easy marketing, introducing mobile ad-buying and Analytics, which will help view the most viewed and liked posts, post engagement rate, website clicks, impressions, reach and a lot more is definitely a big step for Instagram that has been appreciated by 500 million users who see 95 million posts amongst which a minimum of 48 million posts are ads by marketers every day. If you are still deciding whether to use Instagram for your brand – here is a guide on how startups can use Instagram.
Key Features of Instagram Analytics
Instagram Analytics dominantly focuses on Follower Demographics and Post Analytics. Below, you can view your top posts segregated by Instagram based on its impressions for a 7 day or a 30 day period. This will help you understand how many people viewed your posts other than just liking it, giving you an accurate engagement rate, thereby helping you understand if there is a need to improve your marketing.
Amongst all the information that is available, Follower Demographics is a very useful tool, especially for the small time marketers. It helps them discover where their audiences are coming from. Apart from exact locations, it also helps determine the right time to market to them from different time zones.
Again, similar to any other analytics tool, Instagram also lets you break your audience by gender and age to quickly analyze if men or women have contributed to the most number of views, likes and engagement rate.
The ‘Followers’ module is yet another major advantage for marketers to keep a track of the time and the number of hours their consumers are on Instagram on a selected day. This will again help them understand the right day and time to advertise which will surely be beneficial to grow the brand.
Apart from hardcore analytics tools, Instagram has also been experimenting with a few other profile features that seem to be quite useful for businesses to lead traffic to their websites and increase their sales. One of these features is the new ‘Contact’ button besides the usual ‘Following’ button.
The ‘Contact’ button is a linkable location tag which when clicked will show two things – ‘Email’ the user or ‘Get Directions’ on your maps to their store.Since finding the location of Instagram brands has been a major pain point for both marketers and users alike, this new feature will be of some aid.
The second feature is a direct plus-point for brands/products that have been looked around or searched a lot in social media. While hashtags are used on Facebook and Twitter to quickly spot these products, Instagram has introduced an extra line underneath the name in the profile.
While these features are not yet open to all users, they have been introduced for marketers in the US, Australia and New Zealand and in the following months, will be accessible on a global level, including India. Boasting over 300,000 marketers leveraging on Instagram, it has become an ideal platform for small businesses to resort to a much easier and visually appealing mode of marketing that will be directly benefited by this new Analytics tool amongst the others and other special features for brand building.
We will have a more detailed analysis once we are able to use the tool for more brands.
Micro Moments has become a buzzword in the digital marketing environment in recent times. Especially, after Google’s content marketing team, Think with Google, came up with this phrase, more and more digital marketers are trying to utilize the micro moments to benefit their brands.
To start with, more and more consumers are using smart phones for most of their browsing. According to two different Google consumer surveys, almost 68% of smart phone users say that they check their smart phone within 15 minutes of waking up every morning; also, 30% of these users admit that they actually get anxious, when they don’t have their smart phones with them. In most countries, searches happen more via mobiles than desktop computers. This means that digital marketers, who intend to make an impression with their clients, should adapt mobile first strategy religiously.
According to the often quoted KPCB Internet Trends Report, it is said that most people check their phones about 150 times a day and they spend 177 minutes on an average with their phones per day. This means that, on an average, a mobile session lasts for just 70 seconds. Apart from texting their partners, sharing their selfies or travel pictures, commenting on their friends’ photos, there is a specific point of time where people look at their smart phones to get influenced by brands. These small moments where the consumers look for information on their phones are the micro moments that every digital marketer should utilize.
According to Think with Google, these micro moments can be classified into four, namely:
These are the four micro moments that are crucial for any business. With consumers’ online attention span being very low, i.e. as low as few seconds, to leverage these micro moments of consumers, brands must adapt mobile first strategy.
To grasp your consumers’ micro moments, a brand must refine all its contents to be mobile responsive and follow these four approaches.
One of the interesting facts about most consumers is that they might not be rigid on what brand they want. If they are looking at their phone for information or merely browsing, they might be more interested to buy your products if the information you provide interest them. Especially, while looking for information, users pick the business that are there in their search results and that have the most attention-seeking content.
By being there always in their smart phone, via both paid and organic methods, you stand a more chance than your competitors to convert them into your customers. One may think that by merely being there in the social media, how can a brand make the smart phone users become its consumers. The true fact is that by being there when users need some information, your brand is helping customers in their decision journey.
Also, at this point, mobile first strategy plays a major role. Since most of the searches happen via mobile phones, your website, landing pages, ads, posts, and any content should be mobile responsive. Also, it must be interesting and crisp to be read within those micro moments.
While you can make an amazing first impression with the first approach, to make the users your clients/customers, you need to do something more; in fact, you must do something more powerful. Bounce rate of many sites and uninstalling of many apps are on a rise; the main reason for this is that most of these brands fail to be useful to their customers in the four micro moments explained above.
If your consumer is on a search engine searching to buy a product related to your brand, he or she is more likely to pick your brand over a hundred others when your content is useful than the others. We have a detailed strategy on how to create 10X better content than your competitors. With mobile first strategy, you are in a good spot because it allows you create and showcase more pertinent content in these micro moments. This is why in our view a blog is important for every business. Using information like their past search history, location, time of search, and keywords, one can efficiently decide what to showcase to which user.
For example, if you are a brand that has multiple products, based on the target group, their preferences, you can use retargeting to showcase products/creatives that are useful to them. Rest assured, you would have definitely leveraged their micro moment.
If your mobile site or app takes a long time to load, the users are more likely to leave your site/app for other that of other brands. All your efforts of providing useful content and being there goes waste, if the speed at which your information loads is slow. To optimize your mobile site and app speed to suit the speed of your customers, you must follow these steps:
Almost 40% of users wait not more than 3 seconds for a site to load before leaving the site, if you do not optimize your site better, all your other efforts becomes futile.
You have done your best by being there, being useful, and being quick. With mobile first approach, these efforts will definitely reap results. The results can either be customers or leads to prospective customers. However, on the longer run, measuring and reviewing your micro moments strategy is what helps you to refine and evolve with the evolving trends.
The fourth edition of the Digital Chai Pe Charcha was held at Karya Space on Saturday, May 28th 2016. The turnout for this event was fantastic with over 60 entrepreneurs, working professionals and social media influencers participating in the session. The topic for this session was all about Instagram and how it could be used to leverage business.
Instagram is a very powerful platform which when used correctly can help brands and business reach out to a niche and specific audience. The customers that brands acquire through Instagram can display strong loyalty towards the product or service.
Here’s the presentation that was discussed during the session
[embed]http://http://www.slideshare.net/socialbeat_ss/how-to-use-instagram-for-your-business[/embed]
It was a very interactive session with the participants sharing their personal experiences with Instagram and asking plenty of questions. Here are few tweets shared by participants about the event.
Here’s a quick recap for those who attended the session and for those who could not make it yet would like to leverage Instagram for their business
While these pointers can help you, like any other platform, Instagram is constantly changing and brands will have to adapt and implement these changes. In fact over the past couple of days, Instagram has rolled out a massive algorithm change due to which you will see posts based on your interests rather than chronological order. The reach due to hashtags will decrease and your followers will be more important than ever.
What has you experience with Instagram been so far? Do share your feedback in the comments!
