Is it viral yet? Is it viral yet?
Subscribe & get great content in your inbox! Best Practices, Trends, News, and Tips! Supply Chain, Manufacturing, Logistics, Transportation Management, and more! To subscribe to our blog, enter your email address below and stay on top of things. We'll email you with a confirmation of your subscription. Blog Post Reviews. While most testimonials are brief and to-the-point, there’s something to be said for long-form testimonials. Just as long-form sales copy triggers something in our minds that says, “If there’s this much to say about the product, it must be good,” a lengthy testimonial ignites similar feelings.
While going viral should never be the objective of your video marketing campaign (never ever!), the term itself has seemed to have taken off this year, exploded even…
Marketers, we’ve been hearing lots of stats like these: 5 billion videos are watched on YouTube every single day, 1200% more shares are generated by social videos than text and images combined, videos on a landing pages increase conversions by 80% and 80% of users recall a video ad they have seen online in the past month.
Eek…Well, if that’s the case then you best get to grips with the best practices for ensuring your video marketing campaigns smash your objectives and propel your social media forward. Below we reveal some of our favorite tips to help you create compelling, inspiring and actionable online videos.
1. Center Your Video Around the Story, Not The Sale
There is a heap of sales clutter on the Internet that is actively annoying and repelling your customers. Don’t let your brand be that guy – instead, your video should be centred around the story and not the sale. Remember: the same rules that apply for written content marketing apply for video marketing – concentrate on the value you’re providing for your customers.
5 Tips For Getting (and Using) Great Customer Testimonials Service
Make the most of the emotive power of video by appealing to your consumers’ needs and hidden desires. Scared you’ll lose leads this way? You can always place a strategic and relevant call to action alongside a tracked URL at the end of your video (just make sure it fits into your overall story).
Take Warby Parker’s ‘How Glasses are Made’ video, a great example of storytelling it focuses on the origins of the brand, their ethos, culture and people to showcase their eyewear.
2. Make your Video Feature the Best 10 Seconds Ever
One fifth of your viewers will click away from a video within 10 seconds or less. Short and to the point – that’s what the video experts are recommending. Our advice? Get right to the grit of the tale and manage expectations from the outset (within the first 5 to 10 seconds).
Try sparking your audience’s curiosity by asking questions and using teasers to hook their attention right away.
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Your video should immediately convey its value and answer that “why should I watch it?” question that will be on your audience’s mind. Should they watch it because it will make them laugh, because it will inspire them to act or because it will teach them something new?
3. Use Humour in Your Video. Stop Being So Boring!
According to Tim Washer, Social Media Manager at Cisco 'Often in the corporate world, people get nervous about comedy and say it doesn’t belong here. But if it might help you get a point across efficiently and economically, why wouldn’t you try it and see if you can make it work?”
5 Tips For Getting (and Using) Great Customer Testimonials Complaints
So what do your audience want instead? They want to laugh, they want to feel enlightened, they want to be pulled out of their boring 9 to 5's and forget about their realities.
Done well, a brand can reap the rewards from using humour in their video content. Take Snickers as an example.
'Caption writing develops your ability “to get into what John Cleese calls the open mode, where you’re playful and having fun and relaxed and not worried,” Tim continues. 'The more you can get into the open mode, the more often you’ll find yourself coming up with fresh ideas in all areas of your life.
The takeaway here is to not feel constrained by what’s gone before in your industry and don’t try to emulate your competitor’s stiff tone and yawnsome script. Stand out and take a chance on being funny.
4. Optimize Your Video for SEO – Tag it Up
There are plenty of tactics you can use to ensure your videos get found easier in search engines. The first thing you should do to derive the maximum SEO value from your video (before you upload your video to any sharing sites) is to host it on your own domain.
It’s also important to enable embedding on your video as this will help you increase the likelihood of receiving inbound marketing links. Oh and don’t forget to avail of video sitemaps – in this nifty document Google explains how to create a video sitemap with ease.
When it comes to video for SEO, descriptions are everything. Why? Well, descriptions allow Google’s search spiders to make sense of your video and understand what the content entails.
So ensure that your videos are tagged with relevant keywords and fully explained with fleshed out descriptions and unique titles. Keep this rule in mind: if it has a box, it has a purpose – Google needs you to fill it out to help you rank.
5. Educate your Customers with Video & Prove Yourself
Did you know that 65% of your audience are visual learners? One of the most powerful methods you can use for video marketing is to educate your audience. And the great thing is that education comes in many forms. For example, you can teach your customers how to use your product or service and provide useful tips on how to make the most of it. Or you can create a webinar to showcase your industry knowledge, position your brand as a thought leader, add value to your consumers’ lives and collect leads in the process.
Video can also provide social proof for your product or service. When creating video success stories focus on the story of your customer and the success he/she achieved from using your product/service. This nifty question template from Copyblogger will help you create awesome and human-focused video and written testimonials.
Take Upwork’s series of video that showcases their role in providing skilled talent to companies of all sizes on a global scale.
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So you want your website to make you look big. More power to you.
But the business experts I talked to recently say small is cool with customers, too. Small businesses, they say, have a personality, flavor and sensibility that big businesses can't match. And when it comes to what you put on your website, they urge: Don't be afraid to tout your smallness.
'Small businesses can have more fun with their sites, more so than large corporations,' says Alice Bredin, president of Bredin Business Information, a Cambridge, Massachusetts, company that helps large business-to-business companies market themselves to small businesses. 'A small-business site needs to include something that reflects the creativity and personality of its owner.'
5 Tips For Getting (and Using) Great Customer Testimonials Telephone Number
Maybe you're a couple working side-by-side in a spare bedroom or a fourth-generation entrepreneur working to someday hand it over to a son or daughter. Maybe you're putting yourself through grad school. Or you operate from a remote site in the hinterlands and you use only recycled materials. Presented well on a home page and/or an 'About Us' section, all of these may have unique selling points to customers.
5 Tips For Getting (and Using) Great Customer Testimonials Phone Number
'People want character; it has meaning,' adds Kelly Cutler, chief executive of Marcel Media, a Chicago-based Web advisory firm. 'How folksy you get depends on your industry.' An attorney may not want to project an image of him or her working on a leather sofa with a dog curled up nearby. But that may work well for an artist or craftsperson, even an architect, Cutler and others say.
Whatever your industry, 'Tell your story online,' Cutler says. Customers want to know who you are and, if you lead a team, who is on it and what they do. 'You must talk about the team,' Bredin seconds. 'When there is nothing [on your site] about who you are or who's on your team, people wonder about whether you are a good company to buy from.'
Here are the 10 most important things these experts say customers want to know:
- How your business is unique
Answer the question 'Who are you?' as interestingly and compellingly (and honestly) as possible. This includes writing management bios that mention your expertise, years of experience and any unique attributes or details that may set you apart from others.
You need to answer, Bredin says, 'What is unique about your business? Why should I buy from you?' This is missing from many business sites because the owners haven't done the strategic thinking necessary to figure that out, she says.
Be concise, too, Cutler adds. 'You don't need to write a novel.' - A clear sense of what your company offers
'It's incredible how many sites you visit and you're not sure what the company offers,' Bredin says. Make it a priority on your home page to provide at least general information about your products and/or services, with links to specifics on a Products page.
Many service-oriented companies, Cutler says, are concerned about divulging too much information about their offerings, for competitive reasons. Some also feel that consumers will have no reason to contact them by phone if they get all they need from the website. 'There's a balance that needs to be reached' in giving the potential customer enough info to make a buying decision, she says. More often than not, consumers will not contact a company for the missing product information--they'll just move on to a competitor. - Contact information, including a phone number and physical location
This may seem like a no-brainer, but many companies are purposely vague about their location. Some prefer to do all of their business online and see no need to publish an address or phone number. Others are home-based or they worry that giving a street address or hometown will somehow hinder them.
'This is a must, and it's one small way of building credibility and trust' with the consumer, says Wayne Porter, co-founder of ReveNews, an online marketing publication, and former senior director of research at FaceTime, a business security solutions provider. 'A phone number, a street address and even pictures go a long way toward building credibility.'
Showing a physical location, even one that no one will ever visit, comforts a customer that your business is real and legitimate, Bredin says. Provide a phone number that maps to that location, rather than just an 800 number, she advises. - Third-party validation
This means customer testimonials, client lists, case studies, awards and recognition you've received, positive news clippings and the like. Potential customers indeed want to know who you do business with, and what current customers have to say about their experiences. Such items 'forge the underpinnings of trust,' Porter says.
Client lists are especially important if your customers are businesses. 'If you've got some big-name customers, people like to see that,' Cutler says. But make sure you get approval from those you list as clients, she adds.
Porter adds that having a presence on social networking sites and blogs, especially those serving your industry, is an increasingly popular form of validation among customers. 'Social networking now has strong validation,' he says. - Secure Socket Layer (SSL)
SSL is an encryption system that helps protect the privacy of data exchanged between a customer and a website. If you have an e-commerce site that takes credit card information, customers want to know that their sensitive data is encrypted. Get SSL if you don't have it. If you do, let customers know that and about any other safeguards you proactively take. - Ease of use and navigation
If people can't find it, they can't buy it. Porter advises keeping sites 'crisp, clean, and easy to navigate,' but also for site owners to study traffic and usage patterns to adjust their sites based on what visitors are coming for. 'The ability to search a site is very important,' he says. 'Businesses should study their search data to see if there are trends and what to make front and center.' - Clear guidance on your processes
Let customers know, step-by-step, important things such as how to order--and where to go and what to do should something happen out of the ordinary. Customers also want to know your shipping costs and procedures and how they can get status reports. (Don't list your shipping costs and procedures after people enter their credit card information, Cutler urges.) Last but not least, customers want to know how you handle complaints and problems, return procedures and whether you have a money-back guarantee.
Your processes can be described in a FAQ (frequently asked questions) page or separate 'how to order,' shipping and/or confirmation pages. Include a way customers can contact your business or fulfillment agency for more information. - An ability to give feedback
Encourage feedback about your products and services, your ordering process and your site in general, by providing a feedback mechanism--either feedback forms or e-mail links. Not every small business prefers to offer this, in some cases because of resource constraints. 'You definitely want to look at how and what feedback to gather, and you should consider offering an incentive or perk [to the customer],' Porter says. 'You might get some good stories to feature on your site or in your blog.' - Clear calls to action
Customers want signs or buttons in order to act, be it 'Buy now' or 'Sign up for our newsletter' or 'Click here for more information.' But many small-business sites don't provide calls to action or they don't present them clearly enough, Cutler says. 'This is one of the biggest things that nags me,' she says. 'If you have a captive audience, this is the time to grab them!' - Special offers and personalization
By personalizing a sale with a special offer, incentive or coupon, small businesses can gain an edge on their bigger counterparts, Porter says. 'This can be as simple as a hand-written thank-you note, free gift wrap services or a special offer for repeat business.
'Having a personalized touch,' he says, 'is something small businesses can do that many big businesses can't.'
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