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Archives for 2017

How to Optimise Video Content for Social Media Platforms

In this article, Aspect Film & Video’s Evelyn Timson discusses optimising video for different social platforms.

video camera

Social media and video are a match made in heaven. As the almost ubiquitous uptake of smart phones and increased cable and mobile internet speeds allow us to view video at home and on the move, social media has become the dominant medium on which digital video is discovered, viewed and shared. As a marketer, getting on this bandwagon can bring rich rewards, but getting it right isn’t easy. There is after all, a lot of content out there you’re going to be competing with.

Some Social Media Video Rules of Thumb

When implemented correctly, a well-planned video content strategy is a powerful tool in driving brand awareness, brand loyalty and ultimately new customers and clients to your business. Although a large part of every video strategy will focus on what kind of content you are going to create, a crucial element is ensuring that your message is being received by the right people at the right time and for this it is imperative to have a smart distribution and activation strategy and content that is properly optimised for the audience it is intended for.

Before we look at some specific examples, here are some general rules of thumb when it comes to creating video for social media.

Drop the sales pitch and provide value

Connecting with your audience means knowing who they are and the types of content they will be most receptive to. Everything you publish should provide something of value for that audience. People don’t like being sold things on their social media feeds, so if you’re not informing, entertaining or inspiring then your videos aren’t going to travel far.

Create a content calendar

A content calendar will help you plan your content distribution across various social platforms throughout the year. Understanding what you want your content to do is imperative. A content calendar is a visual aid that will help you think about strategic distribution, whilst considering precisely how every content decision you make will play with your historical or future video output. It is also a powerful logistical aid, so you know when resources will be needed for video productions and when to start planning for your next big campaign.

Create unique content for each social platform

Time and resources are always going to be limited, but striving to present a single idea in different ways that best suit each platform will serve you well in the long term. Not only will this boost engagement with your followers on each social platform, but this personalised and tailored approach really does drive brand loyalty and is the most effective way to ensure your social feeds look and feel consistently fresh.

Get your timing and frequency right

If you’re posting videos to social media when your audience isn’t engaged, your hard work will go unnoticed. Facebook users might be most engaged at 8pm in the evening but that doesn’t mean your LinkedIn connections will be. The best way to determine your ideal posting times will depend on a comprehensive evaluation of your analytics data and a touch of experimentation. By initially varying posting times and analysing data gathered during this process, a sweet spot will be revealed. Look for an ideal balance of both clicks and engagement, which will ensure your content is delivered to the widest and most engaged slices of your audience.

I now want to look more closely at each social media platform in turn, to get an understanding of the nature of your potential audience and what kind of content will naturally appeal. Whilst many don’t define it as strictly a social media platform, we’ll start with YouTube as it is simply too important to ignore.

Optimising Video for YouTube

As YouTube operates very much like a search engine, content optimisation is an essential step for every video you upload and will be more than worth the time investment. Choosing traffic generating keywords, considered titles, captivating thumbnails and attention given to the creation of contextualising keyword rich descriptions are all important aspects of video SEO. However, even before you reach this stage, researching the types of content that are more likely to go viral within your industry or niche is crucial. This can be done by buzz monitoring and researching what kind of content plays well to your existing and subscriber and customer base.

Creating a YouTube channel is essential if you are to build a YouTube following and this acts much in the same way your website or Facebook page would, with all your content displayed in once place. Although it can be tempting to order previously uploaded content by popularity, you should instead place the most focus on the pieces of content that most closely align with your current messaging. Once you have attracted your audience, it is likely that they will search your channel for similar content. Don’t make it difficult for them to find what they’re looking for.

Optimising Video for Twitter

Although Twitter has increased its tweet limit from 140 to 280 characters, brevity is still the key to successful Twitter content. Ensuring you use Twitter to not only effectively communicate your expertise to your audience but demonstrate a willingness to engage with that audience is the key to success on this fast moving platform. Sharing and commenting on other’s content and posts should be considered just as important to your strategy as sharing your own unique content.

The most successful tweets often include embedded content, and whether that is an image, a gif, or an engaging video will depend on the specific message you want to convey. Remember that Twitter audiences are looking for bite-sized pieces of news, tips, and links to articles covering key trending topics.

Things move quickly on Twitter, and hashtags are an important tool for both categorising content and ensuring you are reaching your intended audience. The demographics of Twitter are quite broad, which means effective targeting and thorough testing is imperative to ensure your posts don’t get lost in a large and often noisy pond.

Optimising Video for Facebook

Often considered better for B2C than B2B, Facebook has not only got the potential to reach a large audience but through paid advertising will allow you to target very specific demographics. Facebook is a very personal medium that connects friends and family more than it does businesses, celebrities and institutions. As such, it is the ideal platform on which to place personalised content featuring your team and inspirations. With Facebook users looking to engage in a community atmosphere, using conversational language will encourage engagement and ensure your posts never look too overtly promotional.

Facebook is actively favouring video content in its user’s feeds, so creating content that works well with Facebook video can pay dividends. When you consider that creating native Facebook video fares even better than linked to content (e.g. YouTube hosted video), then the potential for creating customised videos for Facebook is clear.

Facebook video plays on mute by default and is often viewed on mobile by people in public spaces, so adding subtitles so people can still get your message is important. Facebook’s paid advertising and PPC is incredibly customisable and very targeted, so investing in this may be worth your while. Running A/B testing is also recommended to ensure your video is hitting the mark.

Optimising Video for Instagram

Instagram’s demographics are notably younger than the majority of social media platforms. In a similar way to Twitter, mastering the use of hashtags is hugely important. However, developing a strong and immediately recognisable visual image for your brand will be the key to engagement and growth.

Accurately identifying the most aesthetically pleasing portion of your content is vital and if any given piece of content doesn’t contain any visually exquisite imagery, it would be a good idea to create something. This process also provides you with the opportunity to create an image or video for Instagram’s unique dimensions which can ultimately provide an enhanced user experience and boost key metrics.

Optimising Video for LinkedIn

LinkedIn is an astoundingly effective social media platform for three very specific things – business to business (B2B), sales, and hiring/reference checking. For B2B content, sharing information specifically about your business and your industry will perform well. LinkedIn also has the added benefit of allowing you to post content in several different places, with B2B content having the potential to perform equally as well on your company page, in relevant groups, and on your personal profile page.

When creating content specifically for individuals, focusing on how you can add value to their lives in a professional capacity is key. As a platform LinkedIn combines the influence of its well-connected users with powerful social and search capabilities. Your video content should be focused on instigating professional conversations and using the responses you receive to create future informative and valuable content.

Thanks Evelyn!

Evelyn Timson is the Managing Director of UK video production agency, Aspect Film & Video. She has years of experience working with some of the world’s most recognisable brands like UNICEF, Nationwide, North Face, TaylorMade adidas, Slimming World and Farrow & Ball. You can connect with Aspect on Facebook or Twitter or see a selection of their award winning work on their YouTube Channel.

Communicating Your Brand to Your Customers

I invited Rachel to write a post for us today about ensuring that your employees are successfully communicating your brand to your customers.

4 Ways to Improve Your Employees’ Communications with Customers

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In corporate communications or marketing departments, employees are trained to communicate professionally. However, most company employees won’t have this same training. To boost your company’s communications, image and relationships with outside customers, clients, vendors and suppliers use the following tips.

Make Branding Accessible

Create a branding guide or “brand bible” to send out to company employees. This guide should show employees examples of how to present information to those outside the company (and inside as well). Will they be showing PowerPoint presentations to potential clients? Show them what a main screen should look like with logo placement, appropriate fonts, etc. Also include several examples of what internal slides could look like. Having a template to follow eliminates mistakes and consistently presents your company brand to the outside world. Create templates for email shout-outs, email signatures, presentations, company branded products (like pens, t-shirts, etc.) and more and give plenty of examples of how these pieces should look.

In addition to the branding guide, place the example templates referenced above in a shared space easily accessible to company employees. Whether that be a drop box location or company internal drive, make sure employees know where to find these files so they can easily create their communications pieces using the right branding.

Hold a Communications Crash Course

Eliminate communication faux-pas by hosting an internal communications crash course. This course should be short (think lunch-hour brown bag seminar) but give helpful, easy to implement advice to employees. To help the principles stick, give the employees a takeaway. This can be a worksheet with helpful links to websites that review grammar, examples of “the good, the bad and the ugly” as far as emails go, etc. Make the course fun and engaging to inspire employees to reread or review their communications and see what they can do to make them better.

Set the Right Example

Is there an internal company newsletter? Or email blasts going out to all employees? Make sure these pieces adhere to the company branding and practice good communications skills. Making sure all communications employees receive from the company executives, human resources and communications departments helps establish the status quo and will give employees another example to look to when crafting their communications to those outside the company.

Provide Correction when Appropriate

Maybe you’ve had a client or customer complain about inappropriate or informal communications. Or perhaps you were copied on an email that wasn’t professional. Either way, when a glaring mistake occurs, take the opportunity to provide feedback on how to improve. While these situations can be tricky to handle, it’s better to set the right tone for your company’s communications.

Speak with the employee and consider involving the employee’s manager (if escalation is necessary). Provide some one on one instruction to ensure the mistake doesn’t happen again.

Following these guidelines can set your company on the right track to having consistent, professional communication with those you do business with—something that can help establish your brand and image.

Rachel works for Built For Teams; intuitive HR software which helps businesses to succeed by encouraging employee growth.

Emotional Energy and the Corporate Website

dog - emotional energy metaphorWe live with two dogs:

  • an intelligent and patient collie/lab cross, who can’t resist carrot cake icing (yes, she ate my birthday cake)
  • and a ditsy, hyperactive and very needy springer/lab cross, who struggles with anything new or strange.

Our springer cross has a metaphorical emotional sink into which the stresses of her day (people at the door, other dogs across a field, quadbikes passing in the lane, cows looking at her over the fence, the vacuum cleaner, etc) pour like water from a tap.

Luckily, that sink has a (metaphorical) drain which can reduce the level of stress in the sink based on a variety of stress-relieving activities. The problem is that she starts the day with a sink that is already half-full, and a drain that is partially blocked, because she has some physical problems which can cause her pain.

My task is to ensure that her emotional sink drains more quickly than the additional stress pours in. If the level of stress overflows the sink, we are in trouble: stress flooding all over the place, and she doesn’t know how to handle it.

Why is emotional energy relevant to corporate comms?

Think about your website visitor: they arrive with a certain level in their sink—perhaps they’ve had a stressful day at work; perhaps there’s a task that they don’t really want to do; perhaps they’ve struggled to find the right URL for your site in their country; perhaps their mobile is almost out of charge.

In their mind are certain tasks that they have to complete on your site. Maybe they’re looking for a contact number for recruiting, an image for a piece they’re writing, some detail about your finances or for your views on a particular industry hot topic.

What barriers does your site put in their way? Every additional hurdle will increase the level of stress in the sink (and diminish their emotional energy). Consider:

  • Problematic navigation (where on earth have they put it?)
  • Form filling (why do you need my birthdate and address?)
  • No contact number, only a generic contact form (how will I know it will get to the right person? Or even that the form worked at all?)
  • The need to register to download an image (more form filling!)
  • Inappropriate filters on news items or job listings so it is difficult to find the best match
  • Information hidden in PDFs rather than on the page so the task becomes much bigger (why do I have to download everything to look for what I want?)
  • Search that doesn’t work effectively (I don’t need all these irrelevant results)
  • Design that doesn’t work with the technology she’s using (why is it so slow? Why must I scroll right to see everything? Why won’t the menu work?)

If the sink overflows, you may well lose that visitor. You may not be able to see the stress overflow—because they’re at their desk, not barking and lunging by your side—but it will have an effect on how they think of your company.

And on how she will react next time she comes across your corporate brand.

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For more on this, read this interesting piece on increasing funnel conversion. Darius is talking about making the sale, rather than about corporate comms, but the point is still relevant.

The Surprising Importance of Local SEO for Global Companies

I invited Brad Shorr to write for us today about the importance of local SEO, even for global companies—I hope you’ll find his thoughts on this useful.

global vs local seo shows globe with cities highlighted
When the subject of local SEO crops up, we tend to think about local businesses, such as dental practices, restaurants and HVAC companies. However, global firms also benefit from local SEO, and in a big way. Here at Straight North, we’ve seen this prove out time and time again. Let’s review why local SEO is such a powerful tool.

Easier Wins on Local Keywords

Dominating organic rankings high volume, highly converting national keywords is a tall and expensive order even for very large enterprises with very large budgets. In contrast, a global company has more than enough resources to dominate local keywords with high local-market volume and conversion potential.

Win in Strategically Important Markets

If a company focuses all of its attention on national keywords, it runs the risk of being moderately visible everywhere, even in markets of little consequence. A better option could be to achieve maximum visibility in the key markets and maintain a more modest organic profile elsewhere. So, if for instance, 75 percent of a firm’s U.S. revenue comes from Los Angeles, Chicago and Atlanta, strong local SEO campaigns in each of those three markets will lift conversions where the greatest number of potential conversions exists.

Expand Strategically — Geographically

Following this line of thinking a bit further, suppose after a period of time this same firm comes to indeed dominate for keywords in those three local markets. At some point, further SEO efforts in those markets will produce diminishing returns, because there are only so many possible conversions in any given market for any given keyword. At this point, the firm is in a position to shift local SEO focus to the next most important geographic market(s), systematically building its organic visibility, rather than canvassing the whole country hoping conversions drift in from somewhere. This approach is also quite useful when a global firm wants to break into a new market or rapidly build its revenue in an underperforming one.

Expand Strategically — Keywords

Along similar lines, if this firm nears its maximum return for target keywords in those three markets, it can expand its keyword target rather than (or in addition to) shifting focus to another local market. Clear-headed keyword research is critical, though. Keyword expansion is an excellent way to generate high-quality conversions as long as there is sufficient volume in those keywords to make the effort worthwhile. In some local markets and/or in certain verticals, this will not be the case.

Local SEO Is Good for the Brand

One of the biggest marketing challenges for a global company is the fact it is global.

People like to buy local, to buy from people they know. Millennials in particular are influenced far more by user reviews and recommendations than by a company’s marketing materials. And what are two key components of a local SEO campaign? Generating positive user reviews and creating web content with a strong and genuine local flavor. A brand that expresses strong interest in a local market and engages local customers through reviews (and other interactions) can overcome the image of being a cold, distant megacorporation. The result is more organic traffic and conversions.

Local SEO Improves Other Marketing Campaigns

Beyond bringing discipline and focus to national (and international) SEO efforts, local SEO enables SEO tactical execution to complement other marketing initiatives, such as new product launches in test markets, with far more impact than what can be achieved otherwise. When on-site and off-site SEO content is added or updated to reflect the firm’s marketing objectives in each individual market, this SEO-driven content becomes more than mere words to impress Google crawlers, it becomes highly effective marketing content that builds revenue.

Thanks Brad!

Brad Shorr is Director of Content Strategy at Straight North, a professional SEO firm in Chicago. With more than 25 years of sales and marketing experience, Brad has been featured in leading online publications such as Entrepreneur, American Marketing Association and Moz.

Why Board portals are essential in 2017

Board portals are a very useful tool to support almost any kind of business meeting. I thought it would be interesting to invite Bernadine Recrio to explain the benefits of board portals for us, in case you’ve not come across them before.

board portals

Why Board portals are essential in 2017

A board meeting is an inevitable part of a business. This is where significant plans and decisions are created and discussed to ensure the effectiveness of an organization.

But before a meeting can even take place, the management has to go through days, or even weeks, of tedious process in preparing board packs for the board members to use. Board packs normally range from 40 to more than 500 pages long. It can be a struggle to compile documents from new sources and previous board meetings especially when the documents come in different file formats. Compiling and converting these files can lead to countless nights of overtime work just so the work can be done on time.

Distributing compiled board packs can be hard too. Sending them through email is not secure enough because email accounts can easily get hacked. There is also a possibility of the email going straight to spam. And if the board decides on using printed board packs, it would cause a great deal of effort to reprint documents and resend them again through mail when revisions are made.

Don’t we think it is now time to take a more tactical view on how technology trends aid in shaping a more convenient way to manage these problems?

Over the past few years, board portals have created a significant difference when it comes to communication in businesses. A board portal is an electronic workspace that lets board members and senior executives securely access board materials and provide functionalities for administrative staff to easily manage board meetings. But considering its functionalities and features, board portals are not just limited to board use. They can also be an avenue for document collaboration, training sessions, sales presentations, and other business-related types of meetings. Besides making the meeting management process easier, board portals are also often used to supplement video conference calls. They are made versatile by how the software can help in increasing engagement among users through the following features:

  • Whiteboard simulation with real-time synchronization on other devices when creating freehand drawings, highlights, notes, and laser pointer tool.
  • The ability of presenters to lock and control the flow of the presentation on other devices’ screens in order to conduct a more focused presentation.
  • The annotated PDF export function that eases the distribution of annotated files before or after a meeting.

Improvement in board pack preparation is not the only way companies could benefit from board portals. Other notable benefits are:

  • Cost savings – Printed board packs are not eco-friendly and at the same time, a lot of money can be wasted from meeting logistics such as the meeting venue, transportation, and food per board meeting. To cut down on such expenses, an organization can use a board portal solution to send soft copies of board packs and facilitate remote meetings. This solution can also help in reducing carbon footprint which is a good way to support corporate social responsibility. Here is a savings calculator to help you compute how much money you can save by going paperless.
  • Security – Companies have long relied on face-to-face meetings and hard copies for privacy reasons. But a paper board pack can be misplaced or stolen in public places. Security breaches like these have no preventive measure and no warning system that would alert directors. On the other hand, board portals provide rigid security measures to protect sensitive information. In a board portal like Convene, password guessing is detected through multiple failed attempts when logging in. This activates the auto-purge feature where important records are automatically wiped out from the device.
  • Mobility – Many corporate boards have since adapted board portal solutions to keep up with the fast-paced growth of globalization. Findings say that the global board portal market grew at a CAGR of approximately 37.50% during 2011-2015 and is expected to grow at 44.80% CAGR during the period 2016-2021. One reason for this growth is probably because of mobility. Considering that the usual executives’ and board members’ schedules can be hectic, it is quite a hassle for secretaries to set up a meeting. Meetings are often postponed to compromise with everyone’s schedule. This causes a delay in the output or progress in the working environment. Whereas with the use of a board meeting portal, meetings can be done anywhere, anytime since board members can communicate through their respective gadgets. There is also no need to lug around heavy printed board packs because all necessary documents can be saved digitally and can be accessed before a scheduled meeting even when offline.
  • Organization – Printed board packs are very hard to store and archive. Looking for a particular piece of information from a previous meeting could take days especially when board packs are not well organized. A board portal like Convene can help a lot in locating significant information because it updates revised materials without eliminating previous records of the document. This provides an easier way of referencing and organizing data. Scheduling an agenda can also be done within the portal to easily notify all of the board members of an upcoming meeting.
  • Ease of communication – All meetings should be productive but not all meetings end up that way especially when there really is no planning involved but only information dissemination. Because of this, some people dread attending meetings since they might only result in a waste of time and resources. With the use of a board portal, a higher rate of participation and collaboration can be expected from board members because board portals can facilitate a meeting even when participants are away from each other.

The emergence of new technology in the 21st century such as the internet and mobile devices have made security, mobility and real-time communication a vital part of successful e-governance. Meetings are made easier through board portals which help promote a more efficient communication process within the organization to provide a more productive working environment. As much as we value the familiar feeling of meeting face-to-face with our colleagues, developing a well-organized communication platform to ease the flow of conveying the message is much more important for the progress of the company. Who knows? Maybe in the next decade or so, hologram board meetings like in Star Wars could be a reality. That way, we could build a stronger and deeper interpersonal relationship without having to leave the comfort of our own office space.

Bernadine is a Business Development Executive for Azeus Convene, award-winning board portal software used by FTSE 100 and Fortune 500 companies. Reach her here.