Business Tips on how to use Video and Networking

I listened to two business tips’ presentations at the Local Enterprise Dublin City Women in Business Network on:

• ‘How to use Video in Digital Marketing’ with Niamh Guckian from Go Motion Academy
• ‘How to network’ with Melissa Curley from Social Bee

FirSt OF ALL, Let me start with Niamh Guckian’s presentation about developing a video strategy that works.

1. Videos create engagement

When doing an email campaign, research shows that an email with a video has a 96% increase in Click-Through Rate. Furthermore, videos up to 2 minutes get the most engagement. Additionally, 92% of mobile video viewers share videos with others.

2. Other considerations to think about with video marketing

However, when you plan your video marketing campaign, you must remember to start in the funnel by following the customer journey. Next, you need to drill down with video content and think about which type of video content would suit your business most. Do not ever do videos for the sake of it!

3. The customer journey

Indeed, when doing video marketing, take into consideration the different stages of the customer journey:

• Awareness – your product/service is unknown to your targeted audience
• Consideration – your audience has found your product/service
• Conversion – your audience is ready to buy your product/service. It’s the sale stage
• Retention – your audience is ready/open to come back and buy your product/service again.

4. Who is your audience?

This is the key question you need to ask yourself.

• Where are your potential customers?

Insider Business Tips: Statistics show that 88% of Business-to-Business (B2B) videos are viewed on a desktop. Consider as well if Social Media would a good platform for your video. Note that YouTube is very competitive.

• What do they want?
• And you, what do you want from them?
• What are the others doing in the business?
• Do you need a disposable content (punctual events) or an evergreen content (tutorials/explainers)?
• Is your content relatable (not over-emotional)?
• What is the story (curve)?
• Is your content useful/educational?

5. Choose a video genre

Once you have identified your audience and what content to go for, choose a genre:

• Ask Me Anything – responding to questions, providing an engaging expertise
• Vlog
• Video tour
• Event highlights
• Review
• Tutorial
• Explainer
• Demo
• Interview
• Live Streaming

At the end of your video, remember to add a strong Call-to-Action by asking your audience to do something. Your call-to-action must be specific (not just ‘subscribe’) and get people talking/guessing.

6. Video genre and the customer journey

Incontestably, each video genre corresponds to a specific stage in the customer journey.

• Awareness stage: A video tour or a vlog
• Consideration stage: Ask Me Anything, demo or explainer video
• Conversion stage: Event highlights or tutorial video
• Retention stage: Review, interview or live streaming video.

7. Video marketing campaign CALENDAR

In that regard, you need to know if your video will be episodic (occasional events) or if you want to stay in your audience’s mind (evergreen content).

Consequently, if you want your audience to follow you through, you will need to create between 6 and 12 videos. In other terms, you must remain consistent in your posting and sharing of videos. If you are short with time, you can start your campaign by sharing one video a week.

8. Other BUSINESS tips

Finally, if you are going for an explainer video, you must ensure it is animated and engaging enough. Other genres can be used for a more personal and authentic delivery.

Budgetwise, if you want to hire an agency to do it for you on an episodic basis, forecast a budget between 800 and 2000 Euros for several videos.

Otherwise, you can make your own videos with the following sites:

• shortcut.com
• human5.com that turns text into videos.

Then, let’s move on to the second and last presentation of the evening by Melissa Curley about small talk for big gains.

1. Why is networking a key marketing tool for business growth and success?

Foremost, we need to be interested in and curious about one another.

Why? What matters about networking?

• The creation of Like/Trust/Respect
• The importance of conversation.

In other words, networking allows you to grow your social capital before you ever need them. It’s like a social currency. To be good at it, try to have fun at it!

2. What is a conversation about?

Most importantly, a conversation is a two-way listening and talking. Therefore, you need to focus on listening to understand, not just on saying something. So, to be a good networker, you need to understand emotions and feelings about words.

3. Tips to improve your listening

Undeniably, listening means:

• Receiving
• Appreciating
• Summarising
• Asking.

4. Preparation for a networking event

Still, if you are introvert and uncomfortable with networking, don’t worry.  Remember this!  Extroverts don’t always make the best networkers, as they aren’t always good at listening and connecting with the others.

Business Tips: before you go to a networking event, ask for the attendees’ list. This way, you can organise, who you want to connect with. This will make you more focused and efficient.

5. 10 pointers to a better conversation

Now, let me share with you a few tips on how to be a better conversationalist.

• Be present
• Enter every conversation assuming you have something to learn
• Ask open-ended questions
• Go with the flow
• Have courage
• Avoid engaging in conversational narcissism
• Refrain from repeating yourself
• Don’t get tangled up in small details
• Listen
• Be succinct.

6. Networking budget

On the other hand, 50 -60% of your budget should go into your networking. Likewise, concentrate on building mutually beneficial relationships.

7. What networking is and isn’t

Thus, it’s good to be aware of behaviours to avoid or adopt when networking.

AS A MATTER OF FACT, Networking isn’t:

• Salesy/Pushy
• Fake/Insincere
• About shameless self-promotion
• Only extroverts are good at it.

CONTRARILY, Networking is ABOUT:

• Making connections
• Gaining knowledge
• Adding value before you extract it.

8. How to create an effective network

IN summary, follow these last business tips:

• Do research about people’s businesses and follow-up
• Keep in touch, nurture contacts through social media and face-to-face meetings.

All in all, did you find this blog post helpful? Do you have further business tips or tricks to share?

 

 

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How to generate business growth through Facebook advertising funnel

Facebook advertising funnel

I signed up for a Learn Inbound Marketing event a few months ago and I must say the content of the Facebook Advertising funnel presentation was outstanding! It also complements very well my previous blog post on Instagram organic and advertising growth.

This presentation delivered by Susan Wenograd is divided into 4 topics:

1. Mistakes advertisers do with Facebook Advertising
2. Facebook Advertising funnel
3. Creative Ads
4. Beyond selling: messenger and bots in a new era of service & growth.

If you prefer listening to a podcast than reading, please find the presentation recording below.

If you have a more visual memory, you will find the podcast transcript and powerpoint presentation further in this article.

PODCAST transcript

1. ADVERTISERS MISTAKES WITH FACEBOOK ADVERTISING

• The first error advertisers do is to open an account and go straight into the conversion campaign.
• Then, the target population told by Facebook is probably more than what you are trying to reach. I’ll explain to you what I mean. When you pick the actual targeting, for eg 1.4 million people, in reality in that pool of target audience they are not all likely to convert. Indeed, some may prefer watching videos, others engaging with your posts and a portion will convert into customers. Consequently, when you select that ‘conversion campaign’ target, you are actually selecting a very small subset of that 1.4 million people.
• Besides, the conversion rate has the highest Cost Per Mille (see this article for more information on C.P.M). Indeed, they are the most expensive adverts you can run on Facebook.
• Furthermore, by selecting the conversion campaign, you are trying to optimise towards the very high-value action, for which Facebook wants you to have 50 conversion events firing per ad set per week. That’s a lot!
• In addition to the expensive adverts with limited audience data, people usually need more than one experience to buy and convert.

Remember that on Facebook, people have no idea who you are, why they should buy your stuff. So you have to convince them like pretty much in any other sales cycles. It’s different from Paid Search (SEO), where people are looking for you.

2. FACEBOOK ADVERTISING FUNNEL

Why an advertising funnel? Funnels are used in marketing and advertising to think about the long sales cycle.

The funnel follows 3 stages:

• Awareness:
• Consideration
• Conversion.

So, you need to complete one stage before moving to the next when you get started with Facebook Advertising. Make sure to run one campaign at the time.

1. Awareness: this is the lowest cost phase of them all. You use cheaper campaign types to cast a wide net and identify interested users through:

• Video views
• Reach
• Website Clicks
• Post Engagement

2. Consideration: this is when your audience is warm, has started to know you. You can use campaign types such as:

• Website Clicks
• Reach
• Conversion

This time, you will measure more their reaction to your advertisement such as users who:

• watched 10 seconds of your video
• interacted with posts
• submitted lead ad.

3. Conversion: this is when the audience is accustomed to you and ready to convert. During this phase, you will use retargeting strategies.

To manage complex funnel cycles, let’s use a good methodology.

3. CREATIVE AUDIT

A creative audit starts with the brainstorming of ideas for posts. For this:

• make a list of things to offer or sell to your audience. Think about the content to repurpose. Go through the list from top to bottom. Now you have enough of content to get you started.

4. Campaign types

Let’s talk about them. Pick an asset and find a good and cheap way to run it.

• Got videos:  Video view campaigns
• Downloadable content: Lead ad campaigns
• Healthy conversion data: Conversion campaigns.

5. AUDIENCES

Aligning with audiences, email list and website traffic are generally the two main ways for people to create custom audiences.  You can do so by, for eg, uploading your email list, specifying certain URLs…)., like in any other types of remarketing.

In the last year and a half or so, Facebook released ‘Engagement Audiences’. This is meant to get people to stay on Facebook and consume content within the platform. Most people don’t want to click and be re-directed to another site.

Consequently, Facebook created ways to retarget these people based on what they did on Facebook like:

• video watching time, i.e engagement
• lead form fill out
• interaction with/on your page…

When you create a custom audience, you tell Facebook ‘I want you to find more people like these’, which Facebook calls ‘look alike’.

When you do that, consider how much percentage of the population you want to match to the audience you specified. If you are on a restricted budget, select a small percentage. Contrarily, if you have a large budget, pick 5+ % or more of look alike.

Then, start testing:

• exclude people/interests or include others
• Facebook feed or Instagram
• mobile vs desktop

Think about what you are optimising for, so don’t pick a conversion campaign unless you have 1.5 million followers or more.

5. Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) 

Auto-bidding does most of the time a better job because Facebook has more data than we do and bid more strategically.

There’s a new feature rollout for e-commerce, the optimisation to value, i.e optimising return on spend. It works very well.

Don’t generalise too much about creatives. Follow these tips to get a better ROAS:

• Video: high engagement, low conversion
• Static image: cheap, still has a decent conversion
• Slideshows: generally don’t do great
• Carousels: generally get great results from them, high interaction. However, testing is crucial (ensure it picks the correct images)
• Canvas: expensive and can be difficult to get results.

Why creative matter to your media cost?

It is because it’s highly related to ‘relevancy scores’. A relevance score measures how relevant you are to people you are targeting to. You can add it to your campaign. The higher relevance score rewards you with low media cost/spend.

Relevance scores are based on social interactions (likes, comments, shares, loves…), in other terms to the virality of your posts.

6. PRO TIPS TO GET INTERACTIONS

Start A/B test ads assigned to post IDs. If you duplicate that ID, it gives another ID number but it’s the same ad. You can cumulate social proof by ID. Stack that proof in a split test with two IDs/posts having different types of interactions.

When you create an ad. follow these steps:

• Click on that ‘preview’ arrow and then view your Facebook post with comments.
• Look for a URL at the top, that’s the ID you want.
• Copy that ID to your other ad.
• For that, you go to your other Ad set B, select ‘create an ad’
• Click on the button for ‘use existing post’ in the post ID
• Paste that ID there.

Now everything that cumulates on that ID will show up in every ad set that you put that ID into. It makes your social media proof stack up way faster than having to run several ads in silos. You only have to do it once. You can do the same with another ad by adding your ID.

Warning: A/B testing is hard on Facebook because:

• you can’t have multiple ad units in the same. They will always add more relevance to video campaigns than any others. It will only select that type of campaign
• Rotation 50/50 picks the campaign with the highest social media proof because Facebook doesn’t want people to leave their platform.

7. SOLUTIONS TO A/B TESTING ISSUE

1. Create a split test with two different targets that do not overlap. Choose what you want to split test. The issue with split testing are:

• it must remain within a set budget
• the ad has to end, it can’t run continuously with your winning test ad.

2. Facebook recently invested in ‘dynamic creative’. You can add up to 5:

• headlines
• text
• line ads
• calls to action
• videos…

It will automatically test and rotate all that for you.

Warning: It won’t tell you which is the best picture, it will only provide you with the best combination. So, you won’t know what’s the ad winner.

8. The FUTURE OF FACEBOOK ADVERTISING FEATURES

Facebook is currently running out of Advertising space in the newsfeed.

So, here are few solutions to remedy this issue:

• Place ads in Messenger. That’s a better way to monetise.
• The chatbot is becoming a thing for e-commerce with its automatic responses walking customers through all the way to purchase. Its virtual assistant also guides and advises people and offer a free shipping voucher at the end. Facebook, with its chatbot, is leveraging itself as a customer service platform.
• You can also buy and sell in the ‘Marketplace’. It has a lower reach. Nonetheless, it is less crowdy and competitive. But most importantly, it’s a very cheap way to advertise as it costs only 1$ per CPM (1$ per 1000 impressions).

Keep an eye on new features as there are new things rolled out every month. I would deter you from using third-party. Indeed, the can’t keep up with what is going on.

For those who would like to download the Powerpoint slides containing more visuals and her contact details, click on the link below:

Facebook Advertising funnel Powerpoint presentation

 

Guest blogging and Community Management for other marketing companies

I have worked for a branding agency Anarium, for which I am guest blogging. In other terms, I write on their behalf Marketing Business to Business blog posts (B2B) on any topics related to ‘Branding’.

I also create and share posts on their Social Media Accounts, namely Instagram and Twitter.

3dman_eu / Pixabay

What is Anarium Agency?

StockSnap / Pixabay

It is a Boutique Naming, Branding and Brand Communication and Consultancy Agency based in London (United Kingdom).

It caters both for startups and established businesses from across a range of industries.

Anarium Agency is expert in:

• Brand Naming
• Brand Strategy
• Brand Identity and Brand Communication.

Anarium has worked extensively for clients such as:

• Nespresso,
• Cardio Legend
• Found Generation
• The Glass Pineapple
• Updown Cork Restaurant
• Huddle Pin
• Shower with me…

You can also find and follow Anarium Agency on:

Link:

http://www.twitter.com/anariumagency

Link:

http://www.instagram.com/anariumagency

geralt / Pixabay

In the below section, you will find all blog posts written for them.

Just click on the arrow symbol to access the posts.

 

How to create a matching brand and company culture

 

BRAND POSITIONING: HOW TO DIFFERENTIATE YOUR BRAND FROM YOUR COMPETITORS’