Cultivating More Customers: The Essential B2C Marketing Tips
There are more than 27 million small businesses in the United States, and a large portion of them are in the B2C (business to consumer) space. As a company, how in the world can you stand out from the crowd?
This can be a tough question. But one of the best things you can do is ace your B2C marketing. When you do this, you'll connect with your audience and convince them to become customers.
Here's how to make it happen with some essential tips.
Utilize Social Media
It's no secret that social media is a massive part of our society. More than 65% of the population uses some form of it.
As a business, this means great opportunity. Social media is the perfect place to cultivate an audience, educate prospects, and generate leads and sales for your company.
Depending on your goals, you can even nurture current customer relationships, helping to retain them and also upsell them. The possibilities are endless.
It's all about deciding your goals, picking the platform that aligns best and getting started. It will put you on the path to social media success.
Respond Professionally to Negative Feedback
Any time you have an online presence as a company, it’s essential to monitor your online reputation. Customers will leave reviews on sites like Google, Facebook, and Yelp, and you’ll receive a mix of both positive and negative feedback.
When you do receive negative reviews, that’s okay. Every business does. The key here is how you respond to them.
Be sure to reach out and show empathy for the situation. Issue an apology and ask them what you can do to resolve their concerns. Potential customers will see this and feel comforted, knowing that you care about your customers and are willing to help when needed.
Engage in Content Marketing
Content marketing is a valuable tool to add to your B2C marketing strategy. The idea here is reaching people where they’re searching.
Let’s say you sell shoes. Someone has a question about running shoes and types into Google, “How do I pick the best running shoes?” Well, the results that show up are just pieces of content that people have written.
And you could write that content, answering the question, and leading people to your wide selection of running shoes. It’s a fantastic way to naturally and organically generate interest in your brand, ultimately growing your customer base.
Consider starting a blog and developing a content marketing strategy for your company.
B2C Marketing Tips You Need
Now that you’ve read all about these essential B2C marketing tips, what’s next for your business? It’s time to implement these ideas into your company’s plans.
However, we know that it can feel a little overwhelming. That’s why our team of experts is here to help you every step of the way.
Questions? Comments? Get in touch with us at any time.
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!
Steps to Create a Strong Video Marketing Strategy
Did you know there are more than 2.08 billion users of smartphones? That's right, and you need to be connecting with them via video marketing. If you do not yet have a video content marketing strategy in place, here is a look at five simple steps you can take to get started.
Step 1: Define Your Strategy Purpose
Before you set off to develop a comprehensive video marketing strategy, you first need to define its purpose. Do you want to educate viewers about your products? Are you looking to entertain them? Ultimately, you want to steer clear of anything that pressures them into buying your product or service. When you define your content strategy purpose, you can then create content that centers around this objective.
Step 2: Choose Your Topics Wisely
You want to choose video topics based on the viewers' needs. If there are already a ton of videos being shared about an item you want to focus on, you must come up with an angle that causes your video content to differentiate itself positively.
Step 3: Hire a Professional
This step is straightforward --if you don't know how to create a quality video, don't attempt to. Instead, hire a professional video content marketing specialist to do it for you. This person can help to make sure to include a variety of relevant aspects of your video marketing strategy.
Step 4: Let Viewers Know There is More Coming
At the end of every video, there should be directions for subscribing to the channel to see future videos. This will attract viewers and let them know that you intend to publish more videos soon.
Step 5: Always Include the Option to Share
Even more important than a subscription option is the ability to share your videos. You want viewers to share across a variety of platforms, which increases your brand awareness and attracts even more consumers to your company website.
To learn more about effective video marketing, contact us today.
A Crash Course in Video Marketing Best Practices
Video marketing has become one of the most important tactics for businesses today. Majority of B2Cs have already started producing videos for their brands. Data shows they see impressive returns on this investment.
In some cases, conversion rates increase 80 percent after adding videos to landing pages, an EyeView Digital study found.
Results aren't guaranteed, however. You need to follow video marketing best practices and avoid common pitfalls if you want to be successful. One of the biggest mistakes brands make is by creating a video with no clear audience and, thus, no real purpose.
The first thing you need to do when you're embarking on a video marketing campaign is to make sure you understand your audience.
Look at the Numbers
Use data to hone your audience targeting. Even if you already have a buyer persona, it's a good idea to flesh out details with customer data you've collected. There are some places you can check, depending on the digital marketing channels you use, like Google Analytics, email marketing and automation tools, YouTube Analytics, and social media.
Here is some of the data you should be looking at:
1. Location
Where does your audience live? Are they spread across the United States, or do you have a concentration of customers in one region (Southwest, Northeast, West Coast) that you can hone your message to?
2. Gender
Do you have an even split of males and females? More males? More females? This will help guide your messaging and approach in the videos.
3. Age
What age group does your brand attract? If you have more Millennials, you may need to take a more casual or humorous approach to get their attention than you would with an audience of Gen Y, or Baby Boomers.
4. Device
Are your customers coming to your website on a desktop device, a smartphone, or a tablet? This might seem inconsequential at first, but it offers important insights on the environment people are in while watching your video and how long they will spend watching it.
5. First time or returning visitors
Is your audience mostly first-time visitors, who are discovering your brand for the first time? Or are you getting a majority of returning visitors? This breakdown has a huge impact on your approach to video marketing because these groups expect very different information.
Learn what they want
To get a sense of what your customers want from a video -the type, the tone -try to glean some insights from what you already know they like.
Identify the content that's generated the most audience interest in the past. Conduct a content drill down in Google Analytics to see what pages and posts have:
- The most visitors
- The lowest bounce rates
- The lowest exit rates
- The best time-on-site metrics
Look for any common threads among these articles. Is there one topic that consistently performs well? Do you see a difference in results when content has a conversational or formal tone?
Then, evaluate which types of content attract the most visitors:
- Blog articles that tell them how to do something or explain a process
- 'About us' section to learn about the team
- Product pages to look at your inventory
These are clues about what your audience prefers and the information they are most interested in.
Conduct Competitive Analysis
Identify a competitor with a target audience similar to yours, who you think is creating compelling videos. Do some sleuthing to find out what is working for them, and if they have any ideas, you can borrow as you launch your video marketing strategy.
Here are two ways to do this:
1. Look at social metrics on the website
Some companies posts videos on their websites and the data on these pages can be useful. See if they have social media icons that show how many times the posts have been shared, and find the most widely-distributed video. This is a good indicator that viewers liked the content enough to pass along. Take note of the title, the type of video, the length, the tone, and the content as examples of what your audience enjoys.
2. Look at YouTube
If competitors post videos on YouTube, you can look at their Channel and see which videos are the most popular. Find the videos with the most plays, as well as Likes and comments.
Again, find any common denominators in their most-successful versus least-successful videos. Are they longer or shorter? Animated or live-action? Featuring one person or featuring multiple people?
This should paint a clearer picture of the likes and dislikes of your audience (or at least a demographic very similar to your customers).
Ask your audience
The most straightforward way to make sure you understand your audience is to ask them questions. Conduct customer interviews to learn about:
- What they like
- What they find useful
- What they want more or less of
- The information they still want from you
- The information they wish they had when making a purchase decision
Once you have gathered all of these insights, you should be armed with plenty of data to make videos tailored precisely to your target audience.
Do you want to learn more about creating videos that will help your brand stand out? Contact us to talk about a strategy that can help your business drive conversions online.
25 Tips for SEO
Earlier this year, John Rampton put together an excellent article for Forbes capturing advice from 25 top professionals in the search engine optimization field. Some of these authors include Joost de Valk, CEO of Yoast, and Rand Fishkin, founder of Moz - a solid lineup of knowledgeable individuals.
Many of these tips point to information that we often share with our clients - content is king. There are many things you can do to on the technical side make your site visible and available to Google, which tell search engines that the site is technically proficient, provides a smooth user experience, and is mobile-friendly. If you are not adding value to your user's day, you are only interrupting it
After that, it is about providing value to users. If you are not adding value to your user's day, you are only interrupting it (this should be a mantra for all sales people in this day and age). Interrupting a person's day without providing something valuable in exchange means that you are going to be unfollowed, unsubscribed, or hung up on if you are making a traditional sales call.
How do you provide value on your website and at the same time optimize for search?
The answer: by creating content that entertains and solves users’ problems.
The truth is that many search engine optimization “professionals” have attempted to create a mystique around the practices supposedly required to optimize a site. It is true that some technical requirements are beyond the scope of most marketers and they involve coding and design that streamlines the flow of information, but beyond that SEO is about content that is valuable to your visitors and is easily shared.
There is a great deal of wrong information on SEO that has been shared on the Internet featuring tips that may have worked a few years ago but will now get your site penalized by search engines due to unethical link building or other areas that create a bad user experience.
Here are some questions you should be asking yourself:
- Which problems are your customers and future customers hoping to solve? For instance, are they looking for entertainment or to find reviews on the latest tech gadgets? Do they need to find a solution for an engineering issue in their plant?
- How can you provide information to solve these problems?
- What phrases might they be using to search for those answers?
- What is the best medium to provide this information?
By answering these questions before ever writing a word of content, you are better able to cater to your users’ unique needs. Define the problems that your prospects are hoping to solve and which terms they are using to find this answer. By building your content (in a way that makes sense without forcing it) around those search terms, you are more likely to provide value and useful information that Google will prioritize.
But what about the medium?
Remember that consumers will reach you in a variety of different ways from both mobile and PC. Visitors are going to consume information in the way that makes the most sense to them at the time. For example, one user may prefer to read a blog post while at work because she is unable to watch a video at the office, but that same user prefers to watch a video over reading articles while on her iPad at home.
People are finding you on mobile, which accounts for over 60% of website traffic on average, will most certainly prefer to watch a video rather than reading a long blog post on their phone. Google and Facebook are giving more weight to video because it adds tremendous value to user experience. On Google, you are 50 times more likely to appear on the first page of search results if you feature different video on your site. On Facebook, you will see as much as 80% higher engagement with your content that features video.
By utilizing written, graphical, and video content, you can capture a wider breadth of a user while providing a deeper user experience. Google sees this and rewards the sites that are willing to make the investment in creating quality content for their users.
It can get confusing with all of the information that is available on the Internet about this topic. Feel free to reach out to us directly if you have any questions regarding SEO as part of your larger strategy.
