Visual Media Is The Social King

 Visual Media (Photos/Videos) are essential to your Social Marketing success. Visual Media is easily shared, has no cultural or language barriers, and connects with viewers on an emotional level. There are over 60 million photos shared daily on Instagram alone!
One easy way to include Visual Media in your efforts is to use Twitter Cards.
Check it out, it's a lot of fun. Remember it's important to keep your Visual Media relevent to your campaign goals!

Getting The Most From Video Players

Your choice of a video player is an often overlooked aspect of realizing maximum return from your websites videos. Here is a thoughtful article that came  through the linkedIn video marketing group.  Written by Colin Osing+  appearing on somedia networks .
We thought we should share this one! Good work Colin!

So you’ve created a professional, high-quality company profile or explainer video for a client.  The spokesperson or owner sounds great, the lighting is perfect and the length is bang-on, long enough to keep viewers engaged but not so long so as to bore them into checking out (right in that 60-90 second sweet-spot).
Posted to YouTube.  Shared to Facebook.  Added to your client’s LinkedIn page.  And of course, embedded on your client’s website, blog and campaign landing page.
Now what?
Have you thought about how to leverage that video to drive leads back to your client?  How to use the video to gather valuable feedback?  Or how to use the video to funnel viewers to a specific landing page or offer?  Are you set up to track the video’s performance, by location, and then report back to your client?  Is the video SEO-friendly?
As Internet marketers, we need to ask ourselves questions like these every time we integrate video into an online campaign, and especially when running a video campaign.

Use Video Players to Drive Traffic

Video players host video content and the good ones enable deep user engagement.  Using the right video player platform (yes, there are many options – SoMedia VideoPlayer, ViewBix and Wistia to name a few) could mean the difference between the success and failure of your marketing efforts, or at the very least, not understanding if you are succeeding or failing.

Most of them are very easy to use.  Sign up, upload your video and build the player to your specs.  If you are using the right video player platform, it can be a powerful, interactive marketing tool with SEO, lead-generation, branding and video analytics features.  A professionally shot video combined with an interactive video player will greatly enhance your ability to deliver results for your clients.  Here’s how:
1.  Video players can capture leads and drive traffic
Different players do this in different ways.  Players like ViewBix offer what they call ‘apps’ – third party overlays that enable things like polls or contact forms.  SoMedia offers integrated marketing plug-ins on their player that enable businesses to promote offers, coupons, showcase content, with clicks directed to the web page of choice and leads funneled to the email of choice.  It’s features like these that really turn your videos into marketing tools.

2.  Video players can improve SEO
Video now appears in almost 70% of search results according to Marketing Week.  Internet marketing ‘winners’ are those taking the time to optimize their videos for the search engines.  Great video players offer simple user-friendly tools that enable the following:
•    Title, description and tagging
•    Auto-generation of meta data
•    Auto-generation of a video XML sitemap
•    Video transcripts
•    Custom thumbnails
3.  Video players enable performance analytics
Successful video marketing requires access to accurate data and analytics.  A great video player platform delivers this with detailed performance and engagement analytics necessary to track ROI. Some of the basics you should be tracking:
•    Views and plays by video, geography and playback location
•    Completion and drop-off rates
•    Drop-off points
•    Social traction (number of shares and to which networks)
•    Click-through rates
•    Minutes watched
If you are an Internet marketer investing time and money in producing and delivering video content for clients, do not let this investment go to waste.  Make sure you take those final few steps to market, measure and optimize via video players and analytics.

What Exactly Is Marketing About?

We just read this blogpost from a company named digitalaptitude.com. We don't know them personally but they hit the nail on the head with the following statement taken from their recent study "TheNew Rules of digital Marketing" We plan on following them to see what they may bring to the marketing arena, and you might consider doing the same.

The way most companies market themselves doesn’t make any sense. These companies focus too much on tactics, like SEO or social media. They jumped into SEO when they heard that SEO was “the next big thing”, they jumped into social media because they “have to be on Facebook these days” and they jumped into Pinterest and Instagram when they became popular because they didn’t want to “miss the train.”

 

Marketing is about being strategic. It’s not about doing something because “it’s the new thing”; it’s about being where your customers are. Instead of trying every marketing tactic in the world and hoping that something will work, start with the end goal in mind and design your marketing strategy backwards from there.

Average 2014 Superbowl Commercial Cost

2014 Superbowl :30 Ad cost

Video Marketing Notes for 2014

From a recent article by Troy Dreier on "onlinevideo.net"
 
Video marketing was a major trend in 2013, with agencies and brands understanding the need to create original online video and use it to engage with customers. In 2014, video marketers will need to up their game, putting more time, effort, and creativity into online video.
That’s the advice of Demand Metric, a marketing advisory firm that recently issued an outlook study spelling out what challenges will face the industry in the coming year.
 
“The most significant trend of 2013 was video marketing,” writes Demand Metric research analyst Kristen Maida. While video marketing didn’t emerge in 2013, she notes that that was the year creating online video and getting it shared became urgent for marketers. The key to doing that was producing relevant, engaging videos targeted at the desired audience.
The change for 2014, Maida writes, is to build on that foundation and grow like crazy. Marketers need to bump up their video output considerably. Video will be the most used and shared type of online content within two years, she says. Social networking will remain the best way to get videos shared, so marketers will need to stay on top of social media trends to ensure they’re focusing on the ones best for their brands.
“In 2013, online video and video marketing went mainstream,” agrees Phi Schmidt, a senior research analyst for Demand Metric. The trend goes hand-in-hand with the rise of mobile devices such as iPhones and iPads.
In 2014, consumers will look to online video for brand marketing messages, Schmidt says. They’ll expect high-quality professional video — accessible on all devices — as part of their shopping experience. Create low-quality video or offer streams that constantly buffer and you’ll lose those buyers.
Not only do videos need to get more professional in 2014, they need to get more interactive. Make a big impression and engage viewers by adding interactive elements to your videos this year.

Facebook Checklist

Here is a quick Facebook checklist for marketers.
Courtesy of Social Media Coach  Andrea Vahl
 

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