Are you Utilizing the Power of YouTube Marketing
If you have been ignoring the impact of YouTube marketing, then you have been committing a cardinal marketing sin. There are some shocking statistics that will show you just why YouTube marketing has become a big hit. Nielsen report shows that in the year 2011, internet video streaming views increased by 35% compared to only 0.2% increase in television views in America. Mobile video viewing also increased by 20%; therefore, it is clear that internet video marketing (like YouTube) is now more popular, cheaper, and result oriented than the traditional TV marketing. As a matter of fact, the number of people who visit YouTube for entertainment, research, and education is alarming. YouTube is now the second most search engine by volume.
However, something else you should know is that about 35 hours of videos are being uploaded in YouTube every minute, meaning if you take 10 minutes to read this article, you will meet about 350 hours of newly uploaded YouTube videos. So what? So, it means that if you are thinking of using YouTube to advertise your products, then you should bear in mind that competition is extremely high; so, you need to approach it with some plan if you hope to achieve positive results. In other words, just uploading a video does not necessarily mean that you'll automatically get YouTube hits.
The following are two suggestions to get you started on how to get positive YouTube performance:
1. Just like a website, content is king, and good quality is paramount. Please invest some time to create a quality and compelling video before you upload. Potentials customers should find your videos useful, engaging, and attractive to view. If you let them feel like they have wasted their precious moment viewing you video, be sure that the video will never go viral, or worse still, they wont come back. The rule of the thumb is this: the video should address the needs of the viewers. Anything else is thrash. Therefore, invest some time in researching on what the customer needs and create something relevant. For instance, it doesn't help uploading a video that talks about meditation, yet you are selling cars. In that case, you would want to talk about 'how to maintain a car'.
2. Since it is Google that owns YouTube, you have to play by Google Search optimization rules to get an edge. For instance, in order for the video to be findable, it must have a title, good descriptions, and tags, among others. Also, you should create a brand if you want to attract and retain customers. This doesn't have to be done with massive investment; all you need is to be consistent with your content, create a similar backgrounds, create a playlist for the most popular videos, and choose an appropriate layout.
All in all, taking your business online is not an option in this internet age if you are to stay profitable, and relevant. YouTube presents you with one of the best channel of informing the online users about your presence; hence you should take advantage.
Cheap Marketing Ideas you can implement on your Online and Offline Business
Don’t have many bucks to spend on your small business or start-up? Establishing an efficient marketing strategy is sometimes a challenge for small business owners in Australia because they are unable to allocate considerable funds for marketing; most of them operate on a shoestring budget. You don’t have to break the bank to market your small business in Australia.
Moreover, very day, we hear from small business owners who think they need special skills to reach their customers. Many of these Australian small business owners eventually get overwhelmed by the number and the complex marketing options available, and end up sitting on the sidelines because they are confused where to start. In this article, we will look at 77 local marketing ideas for small business owners in Australia.
Positioning and branding
- Build brand identity
Building your business brand identity can have a big impact
- Add emotion to your brand
Emotional branding is defined as the successful attachment of a specific emotion to a brand.
At one of the Business Marketing Association (BMA) conferences in Chicago, Jay Baer asked a room full of roughly 1,000 B2B marketers, “Are you more interesting than my wife?”
Can you think of the people you have had an emotional connection with in your life? How did they impact on your life? Now think about the brands and see the common threats among them.
It is true for brands as it is for people: to break through in modern marketing, small business owners in Australia need to be more interesting and relevant in the moment.
Brands need to connect with people in the way a close friend would—through emotion—in order to build, long-lasting, and quality relationships. There are huge opportunities for retail stores to take advantage of emotional branding.
According to one research, smell is powerful when it comes to persuading someone to buy a product. Stores using certain scents in their stores have been found to have a 30% increase in sales.
A study by University of Wollongong and Murdoch University in 2012, emotional branding is becoming widely used globally. According to Dr Steve Bellman of Murdoch University’s Audience Labs, marketers are tapping into customer’s feelings to market their brands. Another study shows men who show love for their brand beer purchase 38% more beer than the average.
Therefore, emotional branding can lead to substantially more sales without companies having to rely on discounts and promotions. On the flip side, however, creating that emotional connection can be a difficult task.
How brands can connect emotionally
- By telling a story that inspires an emotional connection:according to Beth Comstock, General Electric Chief Marketing Officer, you can’t sell anything if you can’t tell anything. Every brand has stories to tell.
- By allow their audience to be the real heroes: imagine who emotionally connected your brand would be by showcasing how your product has changed lives. Simply give your audience a voice, a platform and face to be heard.
- By being authentic: don’t be afraid to embrace your inner geek. Remain who you are and don’t try to be like who you are not. At Bizify, we try to remain true to ourselves. We try to help startups find their feet and we intend to remain true to that mission.
- By embracing the opportunity to surprise and delight:surprising and delighting customers can be an effecting marketing strategy. Use social media and mobile to spark moments of happiness in customers and you will be surprised at its effectiveness. Coca-Cola has really perfected this art.
- Create an irresistible value proposition
A value proposition is a statement that explains what value you provide to your customers and how you do it uniquely. Establishing a substantive value proposition is critical if you want to stand above the crowd. Unfortunately, many entrepreneurs loose out because they fail to articulate a unique value proposition.
Be clear on what your business stands for. What is your promise? How will you put out a consistent and passionate message that attract the right candidate? This will also help you to hire the right people and develop products and services that are aligned with your unique value proposition.
- Be careful with launching too many brands
The big problem for many businesses is they think more brands will make them more successful but they have neither the architecture nor the capacity to manage a multiplicity of brands well. Businesses can increase profits by deleting none-performing brands. Even though revenue may fall in the process, reducing the number of brands will be beneficial in the long run.
Multiband strategies are likely to suffer from diseconomies of scale because of the hidden costs. By letting go off weak, declining and marginally profitable brands, you will be freeing resources to make your few remaining brands better and more attractive to customers. Thus, killing some brands in your portfolio may sometimes be the best way for your business to serve the customers.
- Package your products
Packaging is an important element when it comes to marketing. How you package your products can attract or repel customers. Is your packaging visually attractive through shape, color, design and does it communicate the right brand ideals. If not, it might be time to revamp the way you package your products.
More Difficulties for Businesses to Reach Followers on Instagram
Did you know that Instagram is about to change in a massive way? Instagram has announced that they will be ditching the traditional reverse chronological feed for new algorithm-based personalized feeds.
Posts will no longer appear in a chronological order and instead, followers will see posts based on what they are interested in and their relationship with the person posting, similar to what Facebook does.
This means that Instagram is likely to place videos and photos it thinks you will most want to see from people you are following on top of your feeds, disregarding the time those pictures and videos were posted. For instance, if your friend posted a photo of her new pet 8 hours ago while you were in a meeting, Instagram might make that photo the first thing you see when you open the app. This will be based on your history of interactions with the friend.
Announcing the changes on March 5th via its blog, Instagram said its growing popularity triggered the move. Most users miss on average 70% of their feeds, and this has made it harder for people to keep up with all the content people share on a minute-by-minute basis. This has meant that people keep seeing images they don't care about most of the time.
Speaking to the New York Times, Instagram co-founder, Kevin Systrom, said the new changes will ensure that the 30% of what you care is what is give priority. However, Systrom was quick to point out that the changes will not be abrupt. The Instagram community will wake up one morning and find a different Instagram. Instagram users should expect to see the changes in the coming months.
Not everyone is happy though
Marketing experts claim that these changes are a precursor to what they call Instagram’s content monetization strategy’. You know that Facebook owns Instagram, and this is exactly what Facebook did in 2009 before it began to monetize. In essence, they are trying to limit organic reach, and many brands fear they will have to pay for what was once free to get noticed.
Currently, a post to say 50,000 followers reaches 50,000 feeds. But with the new algorithm, things will be more difficult. That means the number of followers you have will be of little consequence; instead, what will be more important is the level of engagement your content generates.
As a result, more than 190,000 people have signed a change.org appeal to maintain the status quo. With many of those opposed to the new algorithm-based feeds being small business owners, they fear they will no longer be able to reach their followers. It is very unlikely that Instagram will reverse its decision. Similar opposition reactions of “Change Facebook back to normal!!” was witnessed when Facebook changed its algorithm. Twitter also recently faced similar resistance when it tried to move to algorithm based feeds.
Therefore, brands should start bracing themselves up for the new model instead of hoping that the proposed changes will flop. Apart from increasing their Instagram marketing budget, brands should find ways of creating a more engaging content. Simply put, customer acquisition via Instagram is about to get expensive.
With millennial changes such as Instagram personalized feeds, Mjrvisuals can help you increase your reach out of that content in your website through our expertise. We run the gambit of visual imagination including video production, digital marketing, video editing, print design, advertising, graphic design, graphic animation, motion graphic and media design. Be part of our portfolio of clients and let us tell your story to the world. Click here to visit our website: mjrvisuals.com/
Why You Need a Quality Business Website
It is no longer debatable whether you need a website for your business or not. In order to remain competitive and relevant to the modern way of doing business, you need to have a business website to promote your goods and services.
It is, therefore, not a question of whether you need a website or not, but the quality of website you need. This is an age where everything is online. In fact, when people want certain information, the first place they go to is the Internet. That means if you want to compete effectively you need to have a website that ranks high in the search engines.
It doesn't matter what type of business you do. It does not matter whether you are selling services or tangible goods. It doesn't matter where you are located. What matters is the fact that you are online and competing with other business; both small and big corporations. Whatever the case, business websites create a big difference if they are of quality types.
What is a Quality Website?
A quality website is a website that is not just appealing from its overall look, but one that also contains quality content. Actually, quality, SEO friendly and relevant content comes first in the rankings of the features of a good site. Search engines like Google have designed algorithms that have the capability to sift spam sites from quality sites; therefore, if your website has low quality content, then it will suffer greatly in search engine rankings. Remember visitors who come to your site are only interested in relevant, accurate, and updated information, and if they can't find that in your site, they will quickly navigate away to another website or blog which has the information they are looking for.
Avoid high bounce rates
There is nothing as bad as having high bounce rates from your website because it affects your search engine rankings, as well as denying you the opportunity to profit from the potential customer. If other webmasters find out that you have quality content, chances are that they will link to your site. This can be a big boost to your site performance because search engines greatly value inbound links (the number of links that link to your site). Simply put, content is the king.
What a business website can do for you
It is quiet unfortunate that there are still some people who underestimate the significance of creating a quality website for their businesses. Some of them think that websites are only meant for news agencies, sports, bloggers, and government agencies, among others. The truth is that so long as you own a brick and mortar shop, you also need to open your business to the global customer base in the form of a website. You can view the website as a virtual shop. One of the best blessings we have had in the 21st century is the Internet. Why? Because it offers a level playing field for everyone, whether you own a small business or you own a multinational company.
Remain Open 24/7
Being open 24/7 is something that is next to impossible with the traditional brick-and-mortal shop. Moreover, it enables you to sell to anyone, anywhere in the world so long as you can cater for shipping arrangement. In addition, having a website legitimates your business, thereby, boosting the confidence of your potential clients. In other words, it makes your look professional. Most importantly, it is the perfect and more convenient platform from which you can offer customer service to your customers.
It is also important to note that websites are no different from the traditional shop fronts. They also need to be marketed and advertised to attract the attention of potential customers. With millions of other websites competing for the attention of a customer, it is easy to fail to get noticed, and even if you get noticed, it is easy to be abandoned by the customer for the next site. Lest you forget, the next competitor is only a click away. Therefore, it calls for a serious marketing campaign, advertising, and search engine optimization strategies to make it. Simply creating a website and leaving it there isn't going to make any difference.
Let Mjrvisuals help you engage that content in your website through our expertise, we run the gambit of visual imagination including video production, digital marketing, video editing, print design, advertising, graphic design, graphic animation, motion graphic and media design. Be part of our portfolio of clients and let us tell your story to the world. Click here to visit our website: mjrvisuals.com/
Design tips to attract visitors to a website
Website design should always keep millennials engaged on your web page. How to get people to stay longer and keep coming to your website should always be the ultimate aim of any webmaster. The first step is to ensure that the client is happy with the way your website looks, but attracting visitors to your website is only one of the few things you must do.
It is important to note that once you have designed the website and it is up and running, it is competing against hundreds of others in the search engine. So, you need to find ways of encouraging your visitors to stay longer in your site and keep coming back.
However, no one said that creating an engaging site is a simple process. In fact, it is one of the most difficult aspects of user experience to design for because it does not only require high quality content, the content should be delivered in the most exciting way. Moreover, sites which deliver content in a variety of forms such as video, text, images and audio normally experience better customer retention than those that only use text. If you think that your website is feeling a little lifeless, here are some tips you can use to revive it.
- Turn scrolling into engagement
It is possible to get as much as 70% more engagement from one single change in the form of parallax scrolling. Simply stated, parallax scrolling is a trend that is sweeping the web design industry because it provides an eye-catching way of visually delivering a message. With parallax scrolling, several elements are moved as you scroll down the page. This results in a dynamic experience for the user. Modern web design technology means that you can now design an amazing parallax website with pixel perfect accuracy
- Iconography and symbols
This is another great way of designing an interactive web site. Designers actually have the difficult task of presenting text in the most impacting ways. So, the use of icons can assist your visitors to find what they are searching for as quick as possible. The icons and symbols play the role of helping the visitor move from place to place. In other words, they, act like signposts. If you can get a way of using icons to support your text, your sites will become more enjoyable to read.
- Vector images for responsive visuals
Providing your visitors with text only content blocks is obviously not going to help. You must integrate images as well are you are going to create an engaging content. Typically, most images are in the form of PNG, JPEG and GIF. However, the problem with such bitmap images is that their images sizes are fixed; hence, they cannot stretch or contract to fit a new layout size or resolutions. Also, using more images in your site will have a negative impact in terms of loading times of your site.
So, the solution is to use vector graphics which are designed to render dynamic imagery. Vector images can easily be scaled to sizes depending on the screen size and resolution.
Effectively build a successful online business
Search Engine Optimization is evolving very fast from a traditional SEO that overly focuses on keywords and links into one that is more holistic and integrated. In other words, SEO is not just optimizing your page for search engine ranking, but also optimizing everything from the user experience, keyword research, link building, and content marketing to social media. I like to compare SEO to building a house that will last for decades if not centuries. You need to build your SEO on a firm foundation that will last the test of time—one that will not be shaken by any form search engine algorithm changes in future.
If you fail to build your SEO campaigns on these key pillars, your business will greatly suffer as a result of low visibility in search engines and competition. Of course, SEO is still going to change drastically over the coming days, but if you focus on building your house on long-term foundation stones, you can expect to dominate your niche for many years to come. Without much further ado, here are six key areas to focus your SEO campaign.
- Good Quality Content
What is quality content?
You have definitely heard the phrase “content is king” for umpteen times. However, if you were to ask any random marketer what quality content is, you would get varied answers. For some, quality content is one that has x number of words where x can be anything like 400, 500, 700, 1000, 1500, 2000 or 5000 words. For others, quality content is relevance. But what really is quality content?
Quality content is simply content that is evergreen. It should be useful to the users who will in turn keep coming back for more. It should stand the test of time. A website with great content will always be ahead of the competition when it comes to search engine rankings. In order to produce top-notch content, follow the guidelines below.
- Understand what makes your followers tick
There is a reason why some marketers struggle to market their products. The best marketers know whom they are marketing to. They know what makes their audience tick. Therefore, they speak the language of their audience. Writing something that your audience does not care about is a waste of time. Do a proper research before creating content for your website. This will ensure that your content will resonate with your audience and persuade them to buy from you.
- Get feedback
Once you have produced the content, encourage your readers to make comments, react, as questions, add on the content, or even disapprove of the content. Some marketers make the mistake of turning off commenting.
- Provide real value
The best way you can differentiate yourself from the competition is by providing real value to your audience. When users come to your website, they expect to find unique, original, actionable and resourceful content.
- Provide easy-to-read content
Did you know that Google hates content that isn’t easy to read? People have way too many things to do and if your content isn’t easy to read, they won’t read it. Do not create content that looks like it belongs to a scientific journal. If it isn’t easy for a 5th grader, then your content needs to be redone. Follow the following simple rules to increase readability of your articles.
- Ensure your sentences are short. Paragraphs should also be short.
- Break up content into headers, sub-headers and bolding.
- Font size should not be too small or too big. I prefer size 16.
- Include images, charts, videos and other graphics that act as visual aid
- Create lists (like this one)
It does not matter how great and valuable your content is. If it is not readable, you will get high bounce rates. Make it as easy as possible for your readers to find the information they are looking for.
Content with titles that grab readers’ attention result in more shares and are read more. Your title is what sells your content. Certainly, titles act as your content’s sales representative in social media, search engine and in email campaigns. So it is no surprise that titles tell half of the story.
- Linking Strategy
Links act like streets in the search engine universe. They give search engine bots clues on how content is interrelated within pages. Although links aren’t everything in SEO, they are very important because they not only determine the popularity index of a website, they also determine metrics like spam, trust and authority. You can also compare links to votes. If you are getting links from trustworthy sites, it is a good sign even to the search engines that your site is also trustworthy. It is imperative that you get your link building right if you want to build a Google-proof link network.
Here are five quick tips to ensure that your link building strategy is right
- Avoid low quality guest posting. Google is harsh on thin, rehashed or unauthentic content that does not give value. Cookie-cutter guest post still fall in the category of scraped content as far as Google is concerned
- Avoid scarping content from popular website. There is nothing wrong with using content from other well-established and authority website so long as you modify it to suit your audience such as including relevant stats, views, opinions or data. So, do not just copy paste everything including links.
- Concentrate on link quality instead of link quantity. If you were sick, an advice from one qualified doctor is better than 100 advices from 100 random individuals. The same applies to link building in SEO. It is better to have one or two links from relevant, high authority website than having thousands from irrelevant sources. If your website is about dog nutrition, a link from the National Dog Health Association would carry more weight and relevance than one from a blog about fashion.
- The more quality links you have the better. It is a great thing if you are or can get many links from different quality website.
- Beware of link anchor text. The link anchor text says a lot about what you are good at. The text link tells the search engines what your website is all about. Most importantly, make your anchor text relevant to your content. For example, if you are talking about child toys, a link text like “horse racing” will send wrong signals to both users and search engines
- Responsive web design
Responsive web design has become an integral part of search engine optimization. With more people using their tablets and smartphones to access the internet, it is very important for marketers to create websites that can be access across multiple channels. Therefore, responsible web design (RED) means that website pages are able to render seamlessly depending on which devices they are being displayed on. This means that irrespective of whether you are accessing the website from a desktop, tablet or smartphone, the website will remain user-friendly.
Google loves RWD
Google is the divine being in the web universe that makes commandments. What Google wants is what you give it. Google favors responsive websites when it comes to search engine ranking. As a matter of fact, mobile-friendly sites, all factors held constant, generally rank higher than non-responsive sites. What this means is that Google is effectively penalizing sites that are not responsive.
- Passion for the brand
It is difficult do anything without passion. This is one item that many business owners do not take into consideration, yet it is the most important one by a mile. You must have a passion for your brand; otherwise, you will soon burn out. Before you jump into keyword research, content and web design, first make an assessment of how passionate you are with the niche. Are you willing to go an extra mile to create an extraordinary business? Are you willing to learn? Start with passion and you will build a very successful online business.
Importance of Website Mobile Responsiveness to Search Engine Ranking
According to Pew internet report, more than 31% of Americans own a tablet computer. Further, the USA phone market represents about 58% of smartphones owned.
Mobile search will surpass desktop search by 2020
It has also been established that users are surfing the internet several times a day using their mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. Here is the big one! If the current trends are anything to go by, it is predicted that by the year 2020, there will be more internet searches through mobile devices than through laptop or desktop computers.
At the moment, laptop/desktop computers and mobile devices share the searches equally, that is, 50-50. What does this tell us? It simply means that mobile-friendly websites are increasingly becoming popular and if you are a marketer, you should ensure that your web site is mobile responsive. For now, let us focus on why it is important for marketers and small business owners to focus a lot of their efforts in developing mobile responsive site.
What is the rave about mobile optimized sites?
Clearly, the issue of having a mobile responsive site is no longer a choice, but a necessity. If your web site is not mobile optimized yet, the question therefore should be, “when are you going to do it?” Rather than, “are you going to do it?”
Mobile optimization improves navigation across multiple devices:
With a true mobile optimized website, a person accessing the website using either a tablet or a mobile phone will be able to view and navigate the web site easily because the web site will load as it was meant to be seen on that particular mobile device. Thus, you’ll not see skewed pages that don’t fit on a page, for example. Please note that if your mobile visitors are not able to scroll and navigate through the pages as smooth as they would like, they will swiftly go to your competitor.
Mobile optimization improves the overall design of your website across multiple devices:
Apart from the fact that a mobile responsive site is easy to browse on a mobile device, it also makes your site look great. This in turn ensures that users are having great time browsing the site since the content and images do not get distorted. Because a mobile site is designed to load and respond within the small screen boundaries of a mobile device, it makes it easier for contents to maintain their design within the boundaries of a mobile screen.
Mobile Optimization is ultimately a big factor when it comes to search engine rankings:
Consequently, you’d experience lower bounce rates if visitors are coming to your mobile optimized site using their mobile devices than if they were to visit a site that is not mobile optimized. So, what does this tell you? It means that a mobile optimized web site will have better search engine rankings than a corresponding site that is not mobile optimized.
Remember that high bounce rates negatively affect your search engine performance. Also, if you lock out traffic from mobile phones, then you are digging your own grave in the online world. Visitors like convenience; they prefer to have a site that they can browse anywhere without difficulty. Therefore, a mobile responsive site is very critical if you want to reach as many people as possible.