It may be hard to “un-boring” your service (think engineering, finance, banking, etc.) but it’s not about making something that isn’t flashy, into something flashy. Rather, it’s creating content and offers that compel people to want to learn more about how your business can solve a particular problem. Inbound marketing for boring industries is all about producing educational content that shows you are the trusted resource in the industry.
In the last few years, live-stream video apps have emerged as the shiny new toy in the marketing toy box. First it was Periscope and now we have Facebook Live and many other apps. It's the same idea behind them, enabling anyone with a mobile device to broadcast and share life’s experiences live. As with any new medium, marketers are quick to get on the action so they're marketing where their customers are.
They will also puff out their chests as early adopters. There is nothing wrong with brands or agencies recognizing the possibilities of these apps and wanting to be quick to reach their customers, but we would like to preach caution. Substance is important. Strategy is important.
Don’t just add to the fire hose of live content, add substance to it. Create content opportunities that separate yourself from your competitors. Make sure the content is relevant to your brand and creates exciting ways for your customers to engage.
Below is a short list of live-stream video marketing tips that can help brands engage with customers in ways that, until recently, were not possible.
Live streaming of product demos is an extraordinarily effective method for boosting conversions. These apps offer the possibility to change the way webinars are consumed by allowing users to save and view the videos on demand, specifically with Periscope. Customers in the consideration stage may want to view your product several times before moving to the decision stage. While services such as EasyWebinar also allow you to save webinars and videos for a later date, they come with an annual fee that you may not want to pay.
Conducting interviews can go a long way in building your brand image. If you are interacting positively with other experts in your field or even customers, your brand will be looked upon more favorably. Tap into these sources and give customers an opportunity to hold a dialogue with your brand.
Piggybacking off the last tip, Q&A sessions are another way to communicate directly with your customers. These sessions are a great way to clarify any points of confusion that may be negatively weighing on your brand and is another sign of brand transparency. Live-stream apps also allow for a more organized Q&A session than say a Twitter chat or forum, which have character limits and timing inconsistencies. For these sessions, brands can again choose subject matter experts that will deliver clear and educated messages to your customers.
Exclusive, behind-the-scenes content is one of the most significant ways these apps can give brands an edge. Trade shows are still a major player for many brands. Live-stream video apps can give customers around the world an up-close and personal view of major trade shows where your brand is featured. You can also feature “how it’s made” type videos. These will show customers the ins and outs of your product from a point of view that may have otherwise been hard to showcase.
Lack of trust has traditionally been a problem that brands face when trying to market to customers online. The trend appears to be shifting as brands engage better with customers over social media. Companies must still work hard to earn their customers’ trust. Using live video can help with transparency. You will be seeing the face of and speaking directly to brand representatives. This will help build customer trust. I can't stress enough that adding substance is critically important when considering how to integrate live-video content.
Brands today should think strategically about whether live-streaming adds any benefit to their marketing efforts. I've help craft ways to help brands s If you want to learn more, drop me a line!
Facebook Live made its debut in 2016 and continues to revolutionize how marketers use the platform to reach their target audiences. As Facebook’s algorithm continues to give more preference to video that is live over video that is not, marketers need to be smart when using the platform.
The apps listed in the link below were unanimously used by our group of millennials. We will call it our list of the 10 apps college students actually use. I guess you could say they couldn’t survive college in today’s atmosphere without them.
My posts routinely talk about the shifts occurring in the marketing world. We often discuss how companies are shifting from traditional marketing to inbound marketing, or how an Inbound Marketing Agency can help you integrate the two. We also discuss how we’ve modeled our teams differently than most to handle these ever changing demands.
In fact, if you look at our blog roll for the past 18 months, many of the posts discuss practical ways businesses and brands can implement inbound marketing or pieces of the inbound methodology into their marketing plans. That said, what’s the one constant theme in these blogs…content. And what makes your content stand out and help you win new business and meet your marketing goals? A killer content strategy.
We’ve never come right out and said it, but we are today. Content, and more importantly a great content strategy, is the new creative. We help our clients differentiate themselves from their competitors by producing effective content and applying inbound practices to their traditional methods to help fuel a monster marketing plan.
We’ve seen it work for ourselves as we’ve built Verge Pipe Media using these principles and we preach it to our clients consistently. Those who deliver valuable, relevant information in compelling, engaging and even entertaining ways make their prospects smarter and help them make meaningful connections and win the day.
In a recent report by Custom Content Council, the number of CMOs who believe that content marketing is the future of their world has nearly doubled in the last five years. Moreover, their research showed that decision makers increasingly prefer customized educational content from a company in a series of articles over a creative advertisement.
If corporate buyers have become hungrier for relevant information in making important purchase decisions, is it any surprise that they are looking for ways to bypass irrelevant, interruption-based marketing to get to the heart of what really matters to them?
We often tell prospects, if you want to kill trees for glossy print ads, brochures, and pamphlets, or buy time on radio or TV, we’re not the agency for you. What we can do for you is leverage those content pieces in a strategic and synchronized content marketing strategy that can help guide your customers during the buyer’s journey.
We’re leading the way in East Alabama and West Georgia with our content strategy and inbound methodology. Our retained clients all know the importance of content to their marketing strategy and will tell you how valuable our ideas have been. In fact, they now “drink the kool-aid” and often speak in inbound terms and also provide us with testimonials on how our tactics have worked for them.
We’ve been talking about the importance for content and a content strategy, and you may now want to know what this content looks like. Or rather, what forms in which it is delivered. We’re glad you asked because it is really quite simple. We produce content for ourselves and for clients in the form of:
eNewsletters
Blogs
Case Studies
Events
White Papers
Videos
Webinars
Surveys
The best part about creating killer content and implementing a killer content strategy is it then becomes that gift that keeps on giving. It can be re-purposed across many media platforms. A whitepaper can become a webinar, an article or a video. Blogs and eNewsletters can be shared and featured on social media. Each idea can be transformed into many different types of content so that you can leverage all audiences.
They’ll keep hearing from us that boring, dull information will go over about as well as Tony Bennett opening for Kanye West. So, they will have to embrace the fact that engaging, entertaining and sharable content is what will attract the right customers.
It’s time for marketers to stop worrying about their next campaign and look to leverage an overall content strategy to impact their brand. If they publish compelling and timely insights in all the right places, synchronized for maximum impact, it will become part of their brand, establish them as thought leaders in their industry and ultimately help to drive business.