5 Ways to Use Video to Better Your Social Media Marketing
According to Social Media Today, video posts on Facebook have 135% greater organic reach than photo posts. Videos yield crazy engagement on social platforms...and there’s no slowing down. More people are consuming videos from their mobile devices at alarming rates, so it’s critical you position your brand to capitalize on this movement.
Adding video to your social media marketing offers huge benefits such as increased brand exposure, better follower engagement, and more opportunities to drive traffic to your web pages. Your audience will appreciate the variety you bring to their newsfeeds while giving an alternate approach to engaging in your content.
So, give the people what they want more—video!
Five different ways to incorporate video into your social media marketing
#1 Your Story is Important. Share it!
Storytelling is a time-tested tactic that works great at pulling your audience into your brand message. People connect with you through your story. It helps you establish common ground with your followers, making you relatable and real. Stories also separate you from other brands which give you that competitive edge in the industry.
Humanize your brand by communicating its story on video. Delve into the “why.” Who do you desire to inspire and what problems are you solving through your products? What charitable contributions do you make to your community? Share what motivates your team to get up and go every morning. Sharing your story will add greater meaning and purpose when people do business with you.
#2 Offer Short Instructional Videos for Your Followers
An excellent move to promote your brand with social video is to create short, instructional videos demonstrating how your products can be used to solve a problem for the viewer. How-to videos are beneficial because you’re showing people how to achieve a specific result. As a result, you’ll keep viewers engaged while strategically placing your brand in front of your social following.
Reduce your video to the most basic steps of the process then speed up your video in production (editing), so it only lasts for about 30 seconds. These social video snippet can be product-related or simply something relevant to your niche. The beauty is they quickly solve a pain point for users.
#3 Answer Questions
Consider the FAQs that often hit your inboxes or are typically prompted by your prospects. These are excellent content pieces for your blog, email campaign, social media posts, and of course, videos. You see, you’re giving the people exactly what they want because these inquiries derived from your audience. By addressing their questions, you’ll boost thought-leadership and be viewed as an expert in the industry. Plus, it gives you endless content to share across your marketing platforms.
Enhance your credibility by posting videos that highlight one question then offers an in-depth response. Since many social users are leveraging search as a way to connect and discover new brands, be sure to include keywords or hashtags that your audience is actively searching for. Whereas hashtags reign on networks like Instagram and Twitter, keywords perform better on Facebook, YouTube, and Pinterest.
#4 Go Live!
Live-streaming platforms such as Facebook Live, Periscope, and Instagram Stories are driving tons of engagement on social media. There’s something special about connecting with someone in real-time. People get to see and experience the real you! Live videos quickly build trust and can accelerate your brand’s presence fast on social media.
Use these tools to your full advantage. Invite followers into your world by taking them behind-the-scenes at the office, in the field, or company event to share a taste of your brand’s culture. Host live Q&A sessions where you give your audience a chance to ask you anything industry or product related to getting on-the-spot responses. Report breaking news and share your insight and opinion of the matter...give your followers a chance to do the same to foster conversations.
Commit to making live-streaming a regular content strategy in your social media marketing. With consistency, you’ll experience a significant boost in engagement and followership.
#5 Highlight Fan Content
Did you know that 88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation? Positive testimonials and reviews are killer ways to foster trust with your audience especially those who haven’t heard of you before. Prospects want to see if your products or services genuinely bring results. Sharing others experiences with your brand is a great way to show it!
With that said, use your fan’s content as a form of an online review. User-generated content can be creatively compiled into one video as a promotional tool or multiple videos to build up your content vault. Give users credit by mentioning them in the post. Growing this strategy can prove to be a valuable tactic in your inbound marketing as you highlight your customers and give social proof that you’re making a difference.
Don’t Get Left Behind
The numbers and stats prove that people enjoy videos on social media. Its popularity has caused brands to tailor their social strategy accordingly to meet the demands of today’s consumer. Use these tips to better your social media marketing and give the people what they want!
Ready to amplify your social media marketing with video? We know how to create compelling video marketing campaigns that humanize your brand and gives you the slight edge. Reach out to us today and let’s chat!
4 Tips for Creating a Strong Video Marketing Series
Many people think of marketing videos as one-off commercials or testimonials. They will hire a video marketing agency to shoot a few specific pieces and then move on. However, this is overlooking a massive potential to build on the success of their video content.
More and more companies are discovering the value of an informative half-promotional video series that shares exciting information on a regular basis with their customers and website visitors. A video series has the potential to become a popular monthly or weekly event for people who are involved in or curious about your industry or the content you've chosen to provide, creating a compelling video marketing strategy.
Here are a few tips to building your series:
1. Choose An Engaging Topic
Pick something, anything, in your industry that your customers are interested in. While you may be tempted toward product highlights or service descriptions, go for something that more directly connects to your target audience. How-to's, day-in-the-life, and customers stories are more likely to be the kind of content you're looking for.
When choosing your topic, also consider how long each video will be and what kind of attention span you're preparing for. We can use two parallel examples to give you a good idea of the concept:
2. Be Casual and Genuine
Connect with your future viewers through the camera as if you were speaking to them in your living room or personal workshop. Being casual and friendly with your customers allows you to invite them to your video content.
Most modern consumers have been tuning out television and radio commercials for their entire lives and have become resistant to the 'radio announcer voice.' Instead, stay as genuine as possible, up to the point of keeping a few 'bloopers' in to show that you're a real person. This will make you inherently more relatable to them, and they will want to learn from you because you're not an actor hired to speak empty lines.
3. Innovate with Every Video
Don't let your content go stale, make sure you are covering the new and interesting ground with every new video. This is what keeps viewers coming back and sharing with their friends. You want your viewers to be excited wondering what you will show next, then fulfill that anticipation with another installment of high-quality content. Strong content themes are great, but you want to avoid posting similar topics that share content too close together.
4. Keep the Formula Consistent
Once you've got a hooked viewership, they are coming back to see you almost as much as the content you create. This means staying yourself and maintaining the video layout and style is essential.
Feel free to improve, of course, but don't stray too far. The formula is, in fact, the glue of your video series. It gives you a way to hold on to viewers even if you run out of good variations for a single topic. This means that if you started as, say, a camping survival guide, you could transfer into segments on wilderness sports like rock climbing by merely introducing your viewers to it from one video to another.
The Right Formula
Strong video marketing skills rely on a combination of content, charisma, and responsiveness to your audience. Make sure to read the comments on your videos and invite viewers to leave feedback. Anytime you have anew idea for your series, just run it by your videographers and let the cameras roll.
For more information about video marketing or to schedule a consultation, contact us today!
7 Steps to Building an Amazing Patient-Nurturing Workflow
Just as a marketing strategy is essential for any entrepreneur, it is equally vital for healthcare providers such as doctors, dentists or orthodontists. The power of building a robust patient-nurturing workflow serves to increase engagement, improve care, save staff time and increase your client base.
With just a few simple steps, you can take advantage of powerful tools to be more efficient with your email marketing, getting the right messages to the right people at the right time.
The Seven Steps
1. Set goals
Determine your objectives for your email campaign. Is it to inform patients about new services? To provide appointment reminders to improve attendance? Is it to inform and enhance compliance with treatment recommendations? Is it to improve outreach and bring in new patients? As you identify multiple objectives dependent on the patient type, then you can move to the next step where you will narrow your focus for each group.
2. Target your audience
For each goal, there is an intended target audience. Creating a list of criteria for inclusion into the group helps determine placement. Some patients will belong to the group who receive personalized appointment reminders, while another group gets a newsletter about ongoing care and specials on cosmetic procedures. Sometimes these lists will overlap, and other times they will be separate. This is all part of getting the right information to the right people. Laying the groundwork is a critical piece predicting the future success of your workflow.
3. Map your content
Determine what content you will deliver, what you intend to accomplish with this piece and when you will provide it. Thinking about the examples above, the patient who gets appointment reminders might need them when they set the appointment, a week ahead of time and again the day before the meeting. For the patient receiving your newsletter offering a special on cosmetic procedures, perhaps you want to send the first notice three months before the winter holidays and then again monthly as a reminder before party season begins.
4. Compose emails
Be intentional with the message you send and consider that when you compose the email. For each type of patient, you will focus the content of the message and end with a specific call to action. Perhaps that call to action is for the patient to confirm, cancel or reschedule an appointment. Or, it is a link to learn more about a procedure and an invitation schedule a consultation. Decide here what the message will say, how many times to distribute it and what the desired outcome is.
5. Set workflow rules
You don't want to inundate patients with emails, so carefully setting up rules will prevent this. Workflow rules can specify who receives an email batch and when they receive it, but can also exclude patient groups or certain days or times. If your office is closed on Friday afternoons, you don't want to send an email with a call to action that prompts a patient to schedule via phone and no one is there to respond. Likewise, the patient who has weekly orthodontist visits might lose an important appointment reminder if they are also receiving the email about a cosmetic procedure that they do not qualify for at this time.
6. Go live
After the pre-work is completed, turn the workflow and start collecting data!
7. Analyze and improve
Analyze the data and make changes where needed. Are you meeting the goals? What is your click-through rate? What is your conversion rate? Do you see an improvement in adherence? Watch how the workflow performs and prepare to make changes. Change the subject line, the offer, the frequency or the call to action and analyze the impact.
It’s the 9-1-1 for Marketing 4-1-1
At HARNESS, email workflow is just one of the services we offer to improve your marketing campaigns, expand your business and increase your exposure. Contact us to learn more about creating a patient-nurturing workflow that will help your practice.