We’ve generally seen startups and SMEs all thrilled when it comes to digital marketing as it offers quick and tangible results. But a lot of them shy away when we suggest video marketing. The term invokes a budget, production, and execution worry which stops most people from exploring it as an option. Believe us, we are here to change that. Video marketing is not complicated and need not be expensive if you have a clear vision. The benefits of using it are exponential without a doubt. The very fact that YouTube has more than 1B users and is experiencing a 50% YoY increase in the number of hours people watch videos is a big indicator that you need to communicate to your customers in their preferred medium of consumption. If you haven’t tried video marketing yet or started off really small and want to expand, here are some of the things you can try. Types of videos Introductory videos It is hard to understand the superpower booster of a vacuum cleaner when you just say it in words or show pictures. You need a video that can do justice to the product you are selling. Similarly, if you are offering a service that helps people rent houses but also demonstrate that you do it better than all the other people in the market, doing a video can be much better than pages filled with text and pictures. There are many such examples where an introductory product video is simply necessary. And you never know, the first video may just be the last one you need. Take Chat Books for example. The popular introductory video which was an instant hit with mothers currently has over 16M views catapulted the product subscriptions too. Another video that we simply cannot miss mentioning here is the introductory video for Dollar shave club. The video that left its audience in splits also gave the company the visibility it needed to get customers to try it out. Animations While the above videos work well, they also involve a budget with actor and production costs. If you don’t want to start off with a big bang, you can go for quick animation explainer video that can make your complex product proposition look simple. Animation videos mostly have your customer as the protagonist, first shown facing the problem. Then comes your brand to save the world (among other things) making your customer super happy. Check out the Mint videos here which is a classic example of an animation introduction video. You can also see the Spotify video here, which is well made one that is quick and easy to understand. Besides the call to action is so clear that it makes you instantly want to try the product out. There are many freelancers and startups who can make animation videos for as low as INR 3000 / min. So, you see, it isn’t expensive at all to get started. All you need a great idea and script to get started. UGC videos In a day and age where everyone with a smartphone can be a video marketer, you can potentially have hundreds of brand ambassadors talk about your brand. UGC videos are really the new word of mouth campaigns where all need to do is delight your customers and give them the ability to express it. Customers are keen to talk about their experience with your product or service if you delight them. Many even do it without you asking. They review your products or share an experience with your service just like that. The important thing is to then ensure you find them, appreciate their efforts and celebrate them as a hero by sharing their content. If you don’t have customers doing it on their own, just create an ask. Once you do, wait for all the content that comes in and stitch it together for the world to see. Take some of the videos here. The Coca-cola campaign is especially a great example of the potential of such videos. Closer to home, you can see HolidayIQ holidayiq.com do a great job of catching reviews as videos with a smart app that detects where you are before you can do the destination review. Testimonials Testimonials that are in the form of text generally have very less credibility. Anyone can write “I totally flipped over when I used xyz’s Microwave oven.”. – John Doe Instead, have a customer speak about it adds a lot more credibility. Customers aren’t staged actors so the connect with fellow customers is very real. More importantly, these videos don’t cost an arm and leg. Just be nice with “thoughtful thank yous” (which means a nice product hamper could be well received). Influencer videos We all like customers, but we also tend to be attracted towards the better-looking customers who happen to be liked by 20,000 other people. Influencer videos can also be created on the barter system in some cases involving actual payment. But the reach for these videos automatically tends to give the visibility velocity which is much needed. The final impact of an influencer video is debatable, though. A lot of so-called influencers are in the business of collecting goodies and shortchanging brands with no real marketing impact to show. The most important consideration here is that you are clear on your end goal with such videos and can show measurable outcomes. Insider videos You can sum up a bunch of brand showcase videos in this category which is again fairly low on production costs. These can be employee videos, culture videos and behind the scene videos. Just to elaborate, culture videos showcase a slice of how you do business. It can be about your company’s bent towards social activities or the amazing time your employees are having and raving about. Another type of insider videos is ‘expert videos’ where senior and preferably well-known people
Author: meenaxi.badola@justwords.in
How social listening can help with SEO
When you log in to your brand’s social account, you encounter an environment of virtual noise and chatter. If you are on social, ‘hearing’ happens by default – where you see and hear everything around you to an extent that you have awareness about the most important topics and conversations. Listening, on the other hand, is an activity that requires your attention and concentration. It means you understand the sentiments behind the statements and get into a position where you are responding and not reacting. Social listening is done for multiple purposes. It is to identify brand advocates and dissuader. It is to get feedback that you didn’t actively ask for. It is to know the questions that prospects have in mind about your product or services. But one of the most important reasons to do it is from an Online Reputation Management and SEO perspective. It is important to listen to your fans and haters and respond to both and turn the brand around for the better. Here are some reasons how social listening is good for your SEO game with Google 1. Social conversations feature in search results Search isn’t what it used to be ten years back. Earlier you could search for ‘Mumbai hotel’ and get a list of hotels in Mumbai in your search result. Today you are more likely to type “Reviews for top hotels in Mumbai” and get answers from social chatter, Tripadvisor, Mouthshut and video walk-through and reviews on YouTube. Other conversations about your brand could be happening on blogs and social forums. While you don’t have control over what’s being posted, listening to these are important as you need to ensure that the sentiment is largely positive. If needed, you’ll need to nudge the conversations to get desired results. 2. Being responsive to social queries shows Google you are active and that you care Google loves fresh content, and so do we. You might have an answer on Quora which is a year old but if it still getting upvoted, Google thinks of it as fresh content. This is one of the main reasons, negative content takes ages to subside. The only way to tackle this is to have a constant onslaught of fresh, original content and upvotes which can pump up the positivity in the search results. 3. You can use social chatter to create your own FAQs and rank well A lot of social chatter is around queries people have about your product or services. They could also be about the pain points around your product and how you can improve. It is great to get some impromptu feedback too. Once you identify a pattern based on your customer’s user journey, you can pin down their frequently asked questions and give them answers straight on your website. After optimization, your own page is likely to rank for your customer’s FAQ and it can help tremendously to mould their opinion about you. 4. It allows discovery of new keywords to optimize People often don’t talk in the same language that brands envision them to. Your customers may be using short forms, similar words and even hashtags to describe your product and their thoughts around it. Once you identify these words, you can add them to your SEO keyword list. Plug them into a tool like Ubersuggest and it’ll be a sure fire way find out if these are isolated cases or a part of the frequent chatter around your products. 5. It’s a great source to identify potential link websites As you track and monitor your brand on third party websites, it can help you identify influencers and content creators who could be potential sources for links. You can identify the people in the conversation and approach them as potential link building partners. They are already vested in your product. Asking them for their opinion via reviews, guest blogs or focus groups can make them feel that the brand is willing to listen to their opinion. This empowerment automatically nudges them to become brand advocates. In fact, even linkless brand mentions are also potential SEO gold. 6. Get a forecast on topic trends Listening allows you to focus on your customer’s or prospects’ current area of interest. As the conversation changes, you’ll need to make slight adjustments to your product’s brand strategy. For example, until a few years back, people thought of vacations as a list of places to visit and things to do. Today, the conversation is increasingly about ‘travel’ instead of tourism and ‘experiences to consume’ instead of ‘sights to see’. Identifying this trend has now made many destination management companies to re-word their offering according to what their potential customers are looking for. Airbnb’s experiences is a great example of how a brand in the travel industry has created a whole new economy based on this emerging trend. 7. It helps to identify your competitors SEO strategy Your competitors could be eavesdropping on your conversations online, just like you are spying on them. Some could even potentially hijack conversations. Take this instance where users are asking about products on Craftsvilla but Go4Ethnic, their competitor is trying to grab user attention hitching a ride on the question. Social listening is also about monitoring the chatter about your competitors, identify their influencer, and track and understand their strategy. It’ll ensure you can maintain the lead in your customer’s social visibility. While we’ve given a lot of pointers on the positive effects of social on SEO, not doing it right can result in lost SEO visibility and traffic. Here are some of the potential downfalls you should avoid in your social strategy so that your SEO isn’t affected. a. Not posting enough engaging content New content indicates freshness. Content that is engaged with (liked, commented on and shared) shows that you are resonating with your audience. Both of these are SEO signals that overall contribute to your content ranking higher. b. Not posting on G+ We know that G+ isn’t
Social Media Tools: The 5 types to help you become a better marketer
Having a presence on social media is no longer a choice for businesses. It is a way to make sure you connect and engage with your customers, up the game on your competitors and continue to attract prospects. While it is one of the most exciting jobs out there, with great power comes great responsibilities. Social marketers need to be cued in on the hundreds of little changes that popular platforms keep throwing at us every day. From changing interfaces to new algorithms to new formats, we have to be quick on the uptake of what’s in trend and how to leverage it for the brands we manage. We also don’t have a real opportunity to stay away from the job – in daylight and dark, in sickness and health, at work and during vacations… Thankfully, there are a few kind souls out there who double up as brilliant marketers, tech specialists and designers who build tools to make our lives easy. Many of these tools are nothing short of a lifeline for us who have to manage multiple accounts and busy schedules. Here are the 5 types of tools you should be having in your arsenal. 1. Tools that help curate / discover content While a big part of social involves sharing brand content, it also involves sharing content in general that your audience enjoys. Hunting for shareable content is rabbit hole that most social marketers fear, unless you set the clock and focus. Here are some tools that help you find what you are looking for, quickly and efficiently. a. Hootsuite Hootsuite has been around in the market long enough to adapt through iterations of content discovery for today’s users. From tracking mentions to competitors to the industry in general, Hootsuite gives a sensible dashboard to curate and track simultaneously. b. Buzzsumo Buzzsumo is one of the perfect curation tools out there. You not only get to see the most shared and trending content, but also the medium where it is shared and who is sharing it. And the info about backlinks is invaluable. It is, by far, the one content dashboard we can’t do without. c. Pocket Keep bumping into great content as you surf the web. Put them in your ‘pocket’ app and it’ll be available on your phone or computer even if you don’t have a connection. Pocket integrates with over 1500 apps and is available of most major platforms. d. Feedly We can’t end our list without Feedly. It is the most popular RSS and blog reader in the world. Save content from websites, blogs and Youtube channels in one place for distraction-free reading. A lot of Feedly is free but the paid version is worth a try if you do this full time for a living. 2. Tools that help with scheduling While social media marketers are generally a sleep-deprived lot, some tools have made the journey of being one slightly easy. Scheduling posts for the future allows you to get the basic tasks out of the way and be more prepared for daily firefighting exercises. Here are the tools you can try. Buffer Buffer is our in-house go-to tool when it comes to scheduling. Ease of use, multi-platform support and analytics makes this an indispensable tool for social media marketers. Sprout Social Sprout social is a sort of an all-round social tool that does many things like monitoring, engagement, reporting and scheduling. Nonetheless, it is a tool worth considering Later: Later is one of those tools that can especially work well with Instagram. It is great for visual content as it has real-time post previews, hashtag curation and analytics that help track and optimize. CoSchedule The one additional value that CoSchedule brings to the table is that it integrates with your company blog and allows you to publish content and push it on social simultaneously. 3. Tools that help with listening/monitoring Listening to social, putting out fires and keeping the positivity around the brand going is a full-time job – that of an online reputation manager. ORM is often a specialty within social whose main job is to keep their ears to the ground and more importantly respond and not react. Here are the tools that help you do it a. Talkwalker Talkwalker is a conversation monitoring tool that works very well with Hootsuite. Install these two tools to instantly tag, assign and monitor mentions. It does all this and more. b. Reputology If your customers are all over the web talking about you, chances are that you’ll have to be where they are. Reputology checks major review sites like Yelp, Google, and Facebook and responds to reviews in a timely manner. c. Streamview for Instagram Being one of the fastest growing media on social, it is important to keep track of your customers and prospects on Instagram. Streamview can monitor posts by location, hashtag or username. d. Crowd analyzer If audiences are global, you need a tool that can work on the global level too. Crowd analyzer is useful if you have audiences in the middle east. The arabic-focused social monitoring platform monitors social networks, blogs and forums for relevancy, dialect and sentiment. 4. Tools that give stats With so much everyday juggling, it is important for us to not lose our focus on the end goal of our social efforts. As such, brands measure the ROI of social with metrics like reach, engagement, traffic, leads and even conversions. Without the right analytics tools, you won’t have an informed way to analyse the past, make future plans and show what your efforts are worth. a. Followerwonk FollowerWonk is a must-have tool for Twitter. Add your handle and you’ll know who’s following you, how much authority do they have and help you nurture your influencers. b. Google Analytics Good ol’ GA is still very much in the game when it comes to social. GA is perfect to track the traffic you get from different social channels of the same platform (paid
It isn’t a great content if it can’t deliver
Content marketing is the one thing that everyone is doing these days – agencies, clients, brand owners, influencers and even people in general. That’s because we have collectively woken up to the power of content that is created well. What exactly are we talking about here? Is good content the one that sells or is it the one that seeds an idea, a possibility, or an exploratory journey or pulls the user into a story? Does the final outcome of the content matter in terms of driving the brand’s business goals? In the grand old days of content (which was half a decade back), content got written to please search engines. People believed in quantity more than quality. Today the ROI from content is actively sought by clients. As an agency, it would be outrageous to give a plan that will only talk about how the content will be written and marketed. Instead, the premise of the actions is now actively based on achieving outcomes from the content. Whether it is a landing page optimization or social media content or content created for third-party websites, our aim as an agency is to strictly align with the client’s marketing and business goals and drive it actively through our content strategy and execution. Looking for a partner to help with content marketing? Find us at www.justwords.in
What makes us share content?
Did you hear Despacito or Shape of You in a loop last year? You must have shared and had many of your friends hear it too. That made these videos the most shared ones on Facebook in 2017! When was the last time you wrote a blog that received an abysmal number of likes? And how did that make you feel? Not very good, we presume. It means that the people who did see the content did not find it ‘interesting’ enough to engage with it by liking, commenting or sharing. This, in turn, made it even less likely that others would see the content at all. See where this is going? If you’ve spent hours and hours in great long-form blog content writing but not seeing the ‘share’ numbers you want, there could be a few reasons around it. Let’s deep dive into what intrinsically makes people share content and how you can take advantage of this as a marketer. In 2015, Moz and Buzzsumo got together to do the heavy lifting on behalf of the teeming millions and find out insights behind what makes content linkable and shareable. Together, they analysed over 1M articles which gave interesting insights. 1. Shares and links aren’t directly proportional In fact, in most cases, they don’t even co-relate. Articles that had a lot of shares did not have any external links. This fact gave an insight that the driver behind shares and linking are different. Sharing is generally done as an emotional response to an article. Linking is done from a strategic alignment of the article with the content on one’s own website. There is a small sweet spot where some content is equally shared and linked to. This is generally true for articles that have high utilitarian value like in-depth research or how-tos. While we all would love to make our piece for the sweet spot, it is best to choose what is more valuable to you as a marketer – sharing (reach, visibility, branding) or linking (gaining authority). 2. Type of shareable content varies by industry An interesting insight that came from Clear Voice’s study of 640,000 articles across 14 industries found that the type of content marketing that works in different industries varies considerably. For example, infographics work well for only one-third of the industries studied. Tech, beauty, home, and garden have an affinity for long-form content. How-to content works great with arts and hospitality. You can see the complete list here The other side of the coin is that industry and type of content also dictate the media that will be used to share. While 61% of business content gets shared via LinkedIn, 73% of shares in the career industry are done on Facebook and beauty and wellness is seeing an uptake on Instagram and Pinterest. Once you connect the dots on the type of content, the industry and its social uptake value, your chances of making it shareable can increase exponentially. 3. The ‘entertainment’ value of shareable content Going back to the first example of Despacito, this reason seems to fit well. Think of other things you’ve shared recently on a social site and you can identify a pattern. Most shareable content has great entertainment value. An AMA research found that content with positive news which caused excitement, awe and delight were likely to be shared a lot. The study also showed that people who experienced the other extreme of anger or frustration after reading a piece of content were likely to share it. This, in a nutshell, means that content that gets people to ‘react’ and extract an emotion is highly likely to be shared. 4. The social validation factor of shareable content Remember, sharing Despacito not only meant that you were entertaining your friends. It meant you were the ‘cool’ one in your group who shared it with others. The ‘like’ button on Facebook wields more power than you think. If a bunch of your friends has liked a comment, you are put in a tight corner to also like the comment. In fact, it won’t be wrong to say that you can accept something to be ‘popular’ or ‘cool’ if a bunch of other people makes it sound so. As a marketer, social validation for your content can be a governing factor determining whether friends of friends will continue to like and share it. To do this, make sure you display the number of likes and shares the article has received. 5. The drive to do ‘good’ It is an open question if people are intrinsically wired to help those who are less fortunate. Even if they aren’t keen candidates, everyone wants to look the part. Beliefs and causes related content help people define themselves and what they stand for. 84% of people share content to show what they care about. What this means for marketers is that we need to constantly look for opportunities to harness the power of stories. The idea is to show the human connect aspect of a brand. It can be about how your brand has a ‘giving back day/week’ where employees and stakeholders work together to uplift the community around them. It can be about how your equal employment policy or even the lives of the people you touch by powering local economies. 6. Interesting content gets shared What was the last story you shared with your school/college Whatsapp / Facebook group? It is most likely something that you as a group would find interesting. While we as marketers already know that we need to create ‘interesting’ content, the term is as ambiguous as saying someone likes ‘good’ music. So let’s dive a bit more about what can make content interesting. According to an NYT insight group, 73% of people share content to nourish and grow relationships. Going back to the content you shared on your school Whatsapp groups, it is most likely content that gets a
How to Write for SEO in 2018 and Achieve Staggering Results
In 1996, Bill Gates coined the phrase ‘content is king’, though this was hardly true in the early days of the internet. In fact, up until past few years, one could still write ordinary content, artificially stuff it with keywords, throw some Web 2.0 links and still sleepwalk their way to the first page of Google. It was a time when content farms, private blog networks, and blackhat SEO experts made hay in the sunshine of Google. Those times are now over. Google in 2018 is very different from Google in 2000, 2010, or even 2015 for that matter. Rapid advancements in machine learning and continuous algorithm updates have ensure that Google has now become incredibly good at recognizing and rewarding an extraordinary piece of content. And the famous words of Bill Gates have now finally found their rightful place as the gospel truth of internet. In 2018, the fate of most businesses depends, on their ability to create content which is good enough to consistently rank on the first page of Google. What You Need to Know while Writing for SEO in 2018 1. Write for Humans — and not for Google Google wants you to write content that provides value to the audience. It doesn’t want you to use tricks to impress the bot. Period. A page with an unnaturally high keywords density is not going to help anymore. An overly optimized page stuffed with keywords can even attract a penalty from Google. Mentioning the keyword in the title, description, heading, few times in the introductory paragraph is perfectly fine, but don’t go overboard in your quest to convey relevancy to Google. Write in a language that is engaging and easy to understand. According to Google’s official statements, around 60% of searches are now happening on mobile, where people often read on the go, sometimes even while multitasking. This makes it even more important to write in a conversational tone. You don’t need to display your Harvard academic writing skills on the internet, unless of course, you are writing for the Harvard Business Review itself. Write in a way that holds the attention of your audience, brings them delight, and provides actionable advice. Better writing is going to significantly increase the average time spent per visit on your website, which is understood as an extremely important ranking factor, something that has been proven through a study published on wordstream. Write a stellar opening paragraph You have written an in-depth, well-researched piece of content, but the opening few lines of the article are not good enough to hold the attention of the user. Guess what? You have lost the user already. Simply put, your in-depth article can’t move the needle without an even better opening paragraph. Bounce rate is seen as an important ranking factor by Google, and there is no way to beat it without great content, even if your website loads in nanoseconds and has a terrific visual design. This becomes incredibly important in a world with perennially decreasing attention spans, multi-tasking and an endless supply of content. So how do you write a stellar opening paragraph? Study how the best writers on the web do it. John Morrow from Copyblogger is a great example to follow. Write, Edit, Edit ….. until you hit a complete mental block. Take a break, come back and repeat the process. This is one way to do it. Or hire a top-notch writer with a proven track record 2. It’s Time to Write Long In-depth Posts Instead of writing 20 thin pieces of content that don’t take you anywhere, it is better to write that ‘1 epic piece of content’ that can become the go-to source on the internet for that topic. Not convinced yet? Read on … Brian Dean from Backlinko first coined the term — ‘Skyscraper post’ for an article that is supposed to be 10 times better than the next best article on the web for the same topic. The Skyscraper Post is a sure shot approach to get into the top results of Google, even for a highly competitive keyword. Now, how does one write an article which is 10 times better than the next best piece of content? Let’s say, you see an article titled ‘10 Ways to Beat Anxiety’ ranking amongst the top 3 results in Google for its relevant keyword. And it seems to be a well-researched and fairly well-written article. Now, let’s assume, your goal is to rank above it. Don’t write something that is just incrementally better. How about writing an article titled ‘101 Ways to Beat Anxiety’? Of course, it’s not just about the number of points. The article should also include in-depth description along with each point, eye-catching images, expert quotes, research-backed data etc. It’s almost like writing a well-researched, multimedia-rich eBook and publishing it on the web as a single article. And soon you could find your place amongst the top results on Google, sometimes even without massive outreach efforts. Realistically, it’s not always possible to write something as comprehensive as the above example. Nevertheless, the principle still remains the same. The effort you may want to put in a specific article could be directly proportional to the search volume, competition and commercial value of that keyword for your business. But if you want to shoot for the moon, go for it by all means, for there is a definitely proven way to do it. Why does this approach work so well? A truly ‘epic’ piece of content is likely to work favorably on SEO for several different reasons. An in-depth piece of content could rank for hundreds, or even thousands of similar keywords apart from the primary keyword you are targeting. Such a piece of content is likely to perform as an outlier in terms of on-page factors such as organic CTR, bounce rate, average time spent per visit. All these factors are understood to significantly improve ranking prospects. An epic piece of
6 top myths that might be harming your SEO strategy
SEO is one field where changes have been constant. That’s because Google changes its algorithm from time to time – sometimes even several times in a year – to fetch the most relevant results for queries submitted. This only means that the techniques that worked well a few years ago, won’t get you the same results today. So if you want results, you/your SEO team needs to adapt and learn. And therein, lies the confusion. Many marketers do not really know what works in SEO and what doesn’t. And then there are the myths that refuse to die even though they have been debunked several times. These SEO myths have taken a life of their own and keep confusing business owners on what works and what doesn’t. It also leads people to take decisions of stopping investment in SEO. As Phil Frost, the American entrepreneur says, “Successful SEO is not about tricking Google. It’s about partnering with Google to provide the best search results for Google’s users.” To make SEO actually work for you, here are 6 things to do: Understand that SEO surely works if your website complies with Google’s algorithm. Don’t invest in SEO just one-time. You have to work on it constantly to keep up with changing search algorithms and to update content regularly. Search engines take link-building pretty seriously while ranking your site. So don’t ignore it. Rather than stuffing keywords in a bad content, use the White Hat technique to incorporate keywords in good content. Having a secure site or https site is essential for SEO and high ranking. Extra website pages can rank you high only if the content is good and relevant. So, watch this video to trash the SEO myths you believed in till now, and reframe your SEO strategy for that competitive edge! Are you looking for specialized content for your website that can increase your leads and conversions? Get in touch with us Want to read more check the curated list below. Here Is What The Internet Biggies Were Up To In May [Video] Why Exactly Should You Do Content Marketing And How? [Video] 5 Copywriting Sins That Weaken Your Content ROI 5 reasons why supply chain businesses should invest in content
Here is what the internet biggies were up to in May
Did you miss out on what happened in digital last month? There seems to be too much happening with Facebook trying to cover its tracks. Google seems to be on an overdrive with Assistant. And then, there are startups that threaten to create a power imbalance every now and then. Digital is a place where things move at a lightning pace and it can get really overwhelming to keep up with it all. So here’s a concise look at the month of May. After all, we all need fodder for conversations around water coolers! 1. Did you hear the ‘Mhm-hmm’? Google IO happened earlier in May and it is always an event we look forward to. It is one of those surreal places where we take a peek into the future that will be driven by AI and machine learning. Where retinas scanned in India can be looked upon and treated by doctors far far away. Where Google AI will now be able to predict the rate of readmission to doctors 24 – 48 hours before the event, which can drastically alter the course of treatment. Gmail’s new AI composer is going to be fun to see how the auto-suggest works. While not all updates about Google photos were great, we did love the fact that you can click a photo of a document and Photos would automatically convert it into a PDF. The other which allows you to immediately convert a black and white photo into colour saves a ton of time for photobook enthusiasts. Google is going places with Assistant. We know that because usage in India has tripled since its launch. And having John Legend (voice) speak to you is a real plus. The Assistant’s ‘Pretty please’ feature shows how much thought is really gone into a gadget we are putting into our homes, near our children. And it has gone to places where our imagination has still not reached. Assistant can help combine sound and visuals to play out a recipe to you while you are cooking. We were all OMG on how Google’s AI assistant sounded all too real and fixed an appoint with a salon. The ‘Mm-hmm’ is such simple but powerful term that shows how the assistant can and will take over the role of an all-too-real person. The digital well-being initiative is commendable. There is loads of good stuff in there. Here’s some food for thought – everything from search to maps is taking customization to a whole new place. How you see, and experience Google is going to be very different from what the person sitting right next to you is experiencing. Which means, the SEO that works today is going to undergo a radical change in the next couple of years. Brace yourself. 2. Is Facebook really doing enough? Facebook too had its moment with its developer’s conference in May. It has been buzzing with activity after the data beach fiasco. We are yet to see the light at the end of this tunnel. As the month progressed, we saw a series of updates from the social giant. It has re-opened its app review process. It is in plans to develop a ‘Clear History’ feature which will allow users to see and delete data that they’ve shared with apps. Also, in the making is a new tool to detect phishing attacks. The much-needed Analytics mobile app will hopefully bring the ease of management into mobile for ad users. It is also launching a new search engine to help brands find and connect with influencers. Facebook is going the Tinder way and launching its dating feature. It is also parallelly launching a ‘youth portal’ will feature first-person accounts from teens around the world. At this point, Facebook needs to tread with a lot of caution in both these spheres as even a hint of controversy can tip the balance for the company. Group video calling will roll out to Instagram and Whatsapp. It’s own video which will now show additional stats on retention features. 3. Instagram is getting cooler Instagram is experimenting with Music stickers which look kinda cool right now. Instagram is working on adding soundboard-like stickers for Stories Sidenote – sounds like someone at Instagram is a Taylor Swift fan 😉 … get it? “sounds” like pic.twitter.com/N18lPuOK0H — Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) May 3, 2018 It is also testing native payment options within the app. Going the global way, Instagram too is offering new insights to its usage stats allowing people to now know how much time they are spending on the social channel. Something in line with this is the ‘All caught up’ update which will allow users to know if they have exhausted their Instagram feed for the day. We would say that Instagram is making progress but the wow factor is not as much as we want it to be. 4. Linkedin enabled users to follow #tags Did someone just wake up and smell the coffee at Linkedin or is this a weak an adaptation of everyone is doing it, so are we? #Tags have been a tool preferred by users across other social platforms to connect and view the conversation around a particular topic. Being able to do this on Linkedin is a definite plus if it used well with a set of common industry tags. 5. Whatsapp Thankfully, Whatsapp is progressing in a good direction. Groups will see a series of new features which will allow the admin to set a description of their community and also allow certain members to change the icon or description. The good new feature is that you can now get a group summary from the conversations that happened when you weren’t listening but mentioned you. As far as you not wanting to get ‘Good Morning’ messages in groups, you’ll still have to rely on your good ol’ admin to set the rules. 6. Youtube YouTube Red, the company’s subscription video service is now YouTube Premium.
5 reasons why supply chain businesses should invest in content
“Does content marketing work for an industry like supply chain and logistics? Are these not just fancy words being exchanged by marketers?” Those were the precise words that were asked by the general manager of a large supply chain management company. Till very recently, he admitted, he had not even heard of content marketing. Its only after a young turk, who had been recently hired in the marketing department, suggested that they should invest in content, that my client got in touch with us. In the supply chain and logistics business, tried and tested strategies were preferred, he reminded me. The B2B industry of supply chain logistics, he added, was a different beast. Why did they need content, was his question. “Show me the thinking behind it”. And so I made a case for content and gave him 5 reasons why his business should invest in it. In the end, he signed us up for a 6-month trial. That was a year ago. Today, we have been helping this business do 3 things – Create a better brand awareness Cut down the lead nurturing time and convert faster. Reach out to more clients How did we do this? Well, the answer is content marketing. Let’s understand this a little better When it came to B2B content marketing, we have all the stats in the world to show that it is a proven channel to increase brand recall, traffic, and ROI. Here are some stats that I gave – You may want to ask, how does that happen? Its because, in a B2B business like a supply chain management company, the ‘lead nurturing’ period, i.e. the time since the lead first enters your system until it finally converts, is long with multiple touch points. During this period, a ‘generic’ lead goes to become a ‘verified’ lead (the name, email, phone number etc is validated), the business fit is ascertained, the contact is made over the phone, personal meetings are conducted and then contracts are signed. One of the critical tools that come handy during the ‘lead nurturing’ period is a targeted Content strategy that helps nudge the customer from one level to the next by providing reassurances, testimonials and the brand’s overarching mission that eventually aligns with yours. Content marketing can extend a tangible improvement in results to many of these. Apart from that, content marketing can also help a supply chain business or logistics business establish thought leadership in the sector, create brand awareness and customer loyalty. For those of you who are still not convinced that an industry like supply chain and logistics needs content to push its sales funnel, here are five reasons why you should focus on content to help your supply chain business. Five reasons why a supply chain business needs content marketing. 1. You are more than your product/service You started out as an idea to become a solution to a pressing market problem. To build it, you have assimilated knowledge and talent that makes you uniquely you. Your organization culture is an overarching guideline in everything you do differently from your competitors. Many employees, especially those out there in the frontline of your delivery chain will have amazing stories that become a part of your legacy. Content related to these are not just blogs. They are employee stories, videos, and even photo stories that make you ‘you’. 2. Bring the storytelling aspect The basic truth of how we are wired is that we remember stories more than facts. Content marketers are going big on storytelling. And supply chain companies have stories happening with each product delivery. From a birthday gift order that you went out of the way to deliver on time to the impossibly larger order that you managed to deliver against all odds, to the magnanimous warehouse management that you do every day which is fodder for Discovery’s “How Stuff Works”, there is a story lurking around the corner every day. All you need to do is recognize it and bring it out at the right time, through the right medium. 3.Connect and lead with UGC B2B businesses find it difficult to build on UGC because of the very nature of their business. But it isn’t an impossible proposition for supply chain logistics company. A lot of B2B marketers turn employee content into UGC, which works very successfully. Take the UPS store, for example. Check out their insta and you’ll be pleasantly surprised by how they take the content from the interesting shipments they receive and convert into social UGC. Check this one out – it is a perfect capture of what the brand wants to bring out from content on Instagram. Our jobs aren’t glorious every day. But sometimes, we get to go home to our spouses and tell them, “Honey, somewhere out there, somebody is drinking out of a grotesque foot.” We did that. We made that happen. #unexpectedpackandship 69 Likes, 1 Comments – The UPS Store (@theupsstore) on Instagram: “Our jobs aren’t glorious every day. But sometimes, we get to go home to our spouses and tell them,…” 4. Push out thought leadership Challenges faced by logistics companies when doing on-ground expansion is something on another level. It is the one thing that differentiates from the survivors from those who perish under pressure. Keeping focus on ground realities, sharing case studies, creating a sharable knowledgebase that allows the career progress of the talent within the company should be one of the key focus areas for your content. The best part is that you’ll not need to look beyond your office to do this. 5. Your competitors are doing it The thoughts of doing content marketing often drives people to discuss the merits of it. But think for a moment that your closest competitor is already capitalizing on content. Can you really afford to stay back and lose your grip on the game? You don’t have to go in guns blazing, but it is important to
Visual content formats that can triple your content marketing results
OK. We will skip infographics and photos out of the list because it is obvious. Or wait! We will make them more awesome There are several data-driven reasons to use visual content. The facts that our brain’s recall goes up from 10% to 65% between audible and visual content is great. The compounding factor for marketers is also that visual content gets 94% more views at the outset than content without images. While savvy marketers are already into visual content, choosing what type of visual content can work for which content is an important decision. We feel that this will be a key focus area for visual content marketers of 2018. Here are the different types of content you can experiment with (if you haven’t already) and ideas on how to use them. Data-driven visuals There is an innate need that marketers (read people) have to ‘look wise’ and back up decisions with data. Besides, they are so much better than writing data in a long form that no one really has the time or inclination to read. Research backs this up too. Other marketers/customers find data-driven visuals to be the fourth most shareable visual format. Take this visual representation from our Facebook page. Take another example from Adweek. The entire summary of the article is clear from one visual saving you the time and effort to read the whole thing and get to the parts you are interested in. It also makes the content easily shareable on social media. Gifographics Gifographics, as the name suggests are a mix of motion gifs in the form of infographics. They are smaller and give a more engaging feel to the content. With little moving parts, they help you draw attention to the most important parts of the content without being in your face. The ‘How Google Works’ gifographic is a nice example of how you can use one to tell your story and simplify complex concepts. Quotes Let’s hear it from these marketing leaders on how to harness the power of mobile devices in order to build your brand #ContentMarketing #DigitalMarketing Posted by Justwords Consultants on Tuesday, March 13, 2018 Quotes exude power for many reasons. The person giving the quote is someone that resonates with your brand. The quote by itself has a shareable value. The ease of sharing a quote allows you to share your frame of mind about a topic without going to great lengths. Memes Instagram Update #Instagram Update! Now you can schedule your posts anytime you want through third-party social management tools. #AgencyLife #SocialMedia #Meme Posted by Justwords Consultants on Friday, February 2, 2018 Everyone loves a good laugh. It helps show the lighter side of things and even your brand’s sense of humor. The best part is that memes have an inherent quality go viral. If you create a meme format for your brand, it will eventually get recognized as a pattern that your content consumers will look forward to. Videos We are moving to the zone from content is king to video is the emperor. Videos are the medium of choice when it comes to consumption of content across social channels. The good part is that you don’t have to go about brainstorming ideas for a video. Simply take your existing text blogs to check for the best ways to convert them into a video. Check out how we created a quick video about the 101 on content marketing. From a production perspective, both the blog and the video bring their own strengths to the table and we have attracted different types of audience and tailored our content as per their consumption taste. Here’s the video If you have created videos before, think of adding optimized text content for the video which makes a potent mix of discovery and consumption. Screenshots Most marketing how-to blogs do very well with screenshots. This format either works when you have to show step by step instructions or how something looks like and works when you implement it. Chrome’s Screenshot extension is a perfect tool to get this done with ease. Here is an example of how we used screenshots to showcase results from our case study where we increased our client’s traffic by over 140% in a year with targeted content. UGC Who’s the Hero in your life and share with us why you consider her/him to be your Hero? Post a Selfie / Photo of your… Posted by Hero FinCorp on Tuesday, December 27, 2016 91% buyers trust peer recommendations than any other form of advertisement. You also have 20% higher conversions when you have earned media in the purchase journey. 2018 is the year when brands have set out to harness the power of their UGC by connecting it with prospective brand customers and bringing them real stories from real users. The problems that brands used to face with UGC is that brands had to take it with a pinch of salt. We don’t have all ‘happy’ customers and the threat of getting a spillover audience of unhappy customers on your website was a potential PR disaster. To circumvent this, you have brands like Taggbox and Mavsocial that allow you to create a curated wall of social content for your users to consume. You show the good, discard the bad and come out shining bright like the rainbow. What’s not to like? Illustrations In the world of high-res, do illustrations still hold a lure? The answer really lies in the type of brand you are the how you want to shape the content. Illustrations, in fact, may just be that little thing that helps you stand out in the world of blogs filled with photos. It lets you visualize something that may or may not exist in the world around you. From help bots to AI representation for the future, choose illustrations when you want to give a direction to your audience’s imagination At