Top 3 Benefits of Video Marketing

With all the different types of ways that businesses relay messages to consumers, it is incredibly important from the business side to be unique in how you convey your message. Ensuring your product and/or service stands out to consumers is crucial to your digital marketing campaigns. In fact, 51% of marketing professionals worldwide name video as the type of content with the best ROI. The power of video marketing is clear, consumers overwhelmingly prefer to watch videos in lieu of reading an article or post 9 times out of 10. If you need some more convincing, check out the top 3 benefits of video marketing below.

1. Video Marketing is linked to higher Conversion Rates

With any marketing endeavor, your ROI should reign supreme. ROI is single handedly the most important factor when considering one marketing campaign over another. According to Unbounce, including a video on your landing page can boost your conversion rate by up to 80%.

2. Improving email marketing campaigns

Email marketing can be an incredibly effective means of marketing and communication. It can help in increasing your number of customers, retaining your current customers, building rapport with customers, etc. When videos are used in email marketing campaigns, consumers are more engaged and this can be shown through the drastic increase in open and click rates. According to HubSpot, using videos in an email campaign can increase click rates by up to 300%.

3. Professionalism

Practically all industry leading companies use videos as a mechanism of communicating, marketing, and educating their core audience. It’s no surprise to anyone that businesses as a whole are apart of a copycat league. Beyond that, if your competitors are using videos to increase their ROI, why wouldn’t you? Notwithstanding, good content and professional videos may increase your ROI, but poorly done videos and content may have negative implications, so be cautious in the kind of content you release.

4 Common Mistakes Between Marketing and Sales

It’s no secret that the sales and marketing teams of a business are the first two points of contact that most companies have with their customers. With this being said, sales and marketing teams must work together to make sure that the customers journey starts off on the right path. That’s exactly why we’ve put together a list of 4 common mistakes that marketing and sales teams do for you to avoid!

1. No goals or objectives

“There are only two ways to influence human behavior: you can manipulate it or you can inspire it.” – Simon Sinek. Companies need to understand why their doing what they’re doing. A clear goal and objective are incredibly important. Having both your sales and marketing departments establish both short and long-term goals and objectives allows for your company to follow the same path, and when everyone is on the same path, magic happens.

Now, you need ways to measure these goals and objectives on a regular basis. Make sure you have regular follow up meetings to make sure the goals and objectives aren’t shifting off the set path.

2. No customization

Every customer is different. This means that every customer needs to have what we call in the industry as a “unique customer journey”. Say for example that you are selling SEO services. A potential customer who owns a painting business will have a different customer journey than someone who owns an accounting practice. Businesses are different, customers are different and thus the messaging and sales journey that they are going through should be unique. The more customized it is, the more likely they are to close.

Landing pages, calls to action, follow up emails are all examples of ways that you can customize different customer journeys. Now, in general, the more customization the more expensive. So a good tactic here is to create various customer “types” where you make a customized journey for each type.

3. Relying on Quick Fixes

It’s no secret that once sales goals are set, everyone in sales and marketing departments will do everything they can to reach them. At times however, doing everything in the now, might not be the best in the long run.

Let’s say for example that your sales are slowing down, and you want this issue to be resolved. So, you decide to put all your sales resources into a 1-week cold calling campaign to build a good pipeline. That won’t be enough. Now, don’t get me wrong, cold calling is a true art and if mastered can yield incredibly effective results, but it’s not sustainable in the long wrong on its own. It requires a process to work effectively. For example, if you work with your marketing department, and provide them with names of calls that spanned more than 90 seconds and send them a targeted email campaign, this will yield more effective results in the long run.

4. Lack of Analytics

We’ve said this before and we’ll say it again…In god we trust, everyone else bring data. Basing decisions off of instinct isn’t always the best bet. Especially when talking about marketing and sales. With powerful analytics tracking, you give your company a huge advantage, making goal setting and short-term objectives a lot easier to track and accomplish. As per a study done by Zs and EIU, 70 percent of respondents described sales and marketing analytics as “very” or “extremely” important to their organization’s competitive advantage, and 52 percent said their organizations invest heavily in analytics.

Understanding that these issues exist in your business is extraordinarily important. Implementing these tactics will help make sure that your sales and marketing departments become best friends. Results to follow.

3 Reasons You Should Invest in a Professional Website

In the virtual world, professionalism is expected. For companies who rely on their online presence in any regard, having a clean, sleek, and contemporary website is as important as it has ever been. With all the tools available on the market, it is simply foolish to not display your brand positively.

Why Your Business Deserves Professional Website Design

Whether your business is small, medium, or large, it’s one of the most important things to you. You’ve most certainly spent your blood, sweat, and tears building out the operations and business model. In layman’s terms, your website is an attestation of your offering from a virtual perspective. In the modern era, customers will most likely interact in any regard with your website first, and it is their first introduction to your company. You wouldn’t want to scare a prospective client off from a brick and mortar location with an eye soar of a building, and the same thing goes for your website, as in theory, it is your virtual storefront.

When a client visits your website, they subconsciously decide within a few seconds if they will navigate and interact with the website, or if they will bounce. Your goal with your website is to ensure a user or a prospective client has an enjoyable user experience and can simply navigate your site for their ultimate goal, whether it be to purchase a product, inquire about a service, fill out a form, or to find contact information.

The design and functionality of your website plays a key role in ensuring your website visitors can complete the things they came to your site to do in the first place. Beyond this, a professional and thorough website also plays a key role in Search Engine Optimization (where your site ranks on a search engine results page), pay per click advertising, and overall lead generation. Below, we have compiled a list of three high-level reasons that you should invest a professional and functional website.

1. It makes your company look more professional as a whole

As stated above, your website is the ‘storefront’ of your business from a virtual perspective. You want your website visitors to eventually become leads or customers. A professional and contemporary website is the best way to do this. Beyond design, your website must be filled with relevant and thorough information, adequate call-to-actions, and more, depending on what your ultimate goal as a business is.

2. It’s more simple than you may think

In the past, it used to be the general consensus that website design was extremely difficult, costly, and garnered a low return on investment. In the present day, that ‘consensus’ could not be further from the truth. Website design is more simple than you may think, and for a business that does not have in-house means of design and development, there are lots of agencies on the market that can build a professional website without emptying out your pockets.

3. It will pay for itself

In regards to your return on investment, a professional website can have more lucrative implications than other marketing endeavors. The way your new website will pay for itself differs from business to business. As an example, an e-commerce business who re-designs their website would have their increased ROI represented by an increase in sales, whereas a service business may represent their increased ROI with an increase in leads, or form submissions. To help estimate a potential ROI, check out this ROI website calculator, courtesy of Smashing Magazine.

In the modern era, you simply cannot afford to have an outdated and non-functional website that turns customers off. Ensuring your brand can be viewed as professional from a virtual perspective is of the utmost importance in the digital era. For more information on website design, including receiving a quote, click here.