There’s an exciting video format sweeping the internet, it’s the one minute motion graphics video, also sometimes referred to as the explainer video. It may be a few seconds shorter or longer, but its intentions are clear. Create something highly watchable, compelling, visually arresting, make it shareable and fun, and use it to promote your brand/products/services without sounding too corporate and salesy.
The secret lies in making it easy to digest, fun to view, and saying something useful and a little different. The worst thing you can do is turn it into a boring one minute corporate video that has a voice over narrator only talking about your product messages.
The best thing that can happen is that your one minute video goes viral, and you can end up with thousands, or hundreds of thousands and in some rarer cases even millions of views and fans.
Get ready, get set, and go, it’s time to delve into 60 second videos.
If you’re a small business, getting your head around the web isn’t really that easy. Chances are that most of your energy and time is currently focused on making your own particular business work optimally, and growing your customer base.
The internet is evolving rapidly, and many small businesses face some of the following issues when embarking on improving their online presence:
1) Budgetary, let’s face it, investing in the internet can feel like a bottomless pit if you’re not careful. If you’re not that familiar with what’s needed to get a decent online presence, you could be spending too much by buying expensive custom solutions that are no better than much cheaper and sometimes free services. On the other hand, go too cheap and expect everything for free, and your online presence may look a real mess. There’s nothing less credible than a business website that looks like it hasn’t been updated for several months and in some cases years.
2) Tech support, this can be a major problem. Chances are if you’re attempting to do innovative and interesting things on the web, at some point you’re going to need to run into needing some tech support. Hiring a full time techie isn’t always such a good idea as it’s another salary count on the payroll, and you don’t want the poor techie to be twiddling his thumbs most of the day or playing Angry Birds instead of contributing to your business performance. There are types of tech support that are inexpensive, but at the end of the day you do need to know that somewhere there’s a techie you can contact who can help you if you’re stuck in a jam.
3) Planning, most successful online activities are carefully planned, and don’t just happen. When you’re a small business, finding time to plan isn’t always that easy. Making time to plan your online presence can be essential.
4) Being interesting, the problem with finding inexpensive off the shelf solutions to your marketing problems is that they’re often not very interesting. Your website looks like a typical template site, which means it looks like a thousand others your customer has seen before, and it’s hardly engaging.
5) Mobile, these days if you aren’t planning for mobile, you’re not really understanding where the web is at. Make sure that all you digital plans involve doing something with mobile.
6) Lacking lead generation capability online, a lot of small businesses have a simple brochure type website, a small twitter account, a lame looking Facebook page, and they reckon they’re online and it’s going to make a difference. The problem with this approach is that one can hardly expect the web to serve as a serious lead generation opportunity if what one has to show about your business is pretty unimpressive.
7) Broadcasting not engaging, this is a problem that even many large companies face, as it’s so easy to get back into the bad habit of broadcasting what you want to say rather than really engaging with your customer.
8) Blindly leading the way, this happens all too often, because if you aren’t collecting and using decent quality analytics, then what are you doing on the internet and where are you heading.
Most small companies think SEO is just too difficult for them, and that it won’t make much difference to their business, but they’re wrong. If your customers cannot find you, how will you be noticed in an ever crowded market place. It doesn’t matter what industry you operate in, there’s always competition, and the competition will figure out how to use the web properly if you don’t.
The great thing about SEO is that there are an amazing number of tools that are free out there, and it doesn’t take a lot of knowledge to learn how to use them.
So what’s stopping you. Isn’t it time to get noticed.
Here are just five great SEO tools that you can use to improve your visibility on the web:
1) Wordstream, free keyword search tool. This amazing search tool offers thousands of keyword ideas from a huge database of more than a trillion unique searches. It outperforms some of the paid alternatives in the market.
3) Broken link report, Xenu’s Link Sleuth is spidering software that checks Web sites for broken links. The site performs verification on normal links, images, frames, backgrounds, and local image maps.
5) Google snippet preview, the snippet that appears in Google Search is usually taken from these meta tags. The Google Snippet Preview tool helps visualize and optimize what is displayed to searchers.
Investing into online marketing is always a challenge for small businesses. Below are some tips to consider.
The online world is virtually limitless in scope and size, and owning a website or developing a social media page (or several) doesn’t guarantee any measure of marketing success.
Online assets require careful development, nurturing and constant updates, as well as a keener understanding of not just traditional marketing principles (that still apply just as much in the online world), but specifically online marketing principles.
Here are some great tips for small businesses when investing in online marketing.
Tip 1) Don’t underestimate the importance of good quality search. Next to having a good, functional website, you also want to be found. There’s no point having content and valuable information for your customers, but they don’t know you even exist
Tip 2) Find ways for your offline and online marketing to work well together (seek online offline harmony). This is harder to achieve than it sounds, but also sometimes surprisingly easy to get underway.
The hard part here is to do it well, and then to be able to properly attribute your levels of investment in offline and online marketing, but for small businesses there are many ways to creatively get your online and offline marketing to work well together.
Tip 3) Don’t just look like everybody else out there, try to look better and be different whenever possible. How many times have you been to a small business website, and you know that the site only gets updated once in a blue moon, and that the content is already mostly out of date?
That used to be ok, but in today’s internet age, it’s starting to look very embarrassing and can make your customers wonder whether you are serious about your business.
Tip 4) Pay attention to providing mobile access. Customer are increasingly using mobile as the way they surf the web, and you need to make sure that your website and any other content you have is mobile friendly.
Tip 5) Get to understand the value of building and looking after a community, or at least joining one or several. Ok, so you’re a small business and you don’t necessarily want to invest the time and effort to develop your own community.
But there are many communities out there where you ought to be visible, and if you’re not there, chances are your competitors will be. Communities are the way that the web will increasingly function in the future, and if you want to stay ahead of the game, think community.
Tip 6) Develop good quality content. This is tied into search, finding and developing good quality content is essential these days to being discovered, found and repeatedly visited.
What is good quality content? Relevance is a key, originality another, and frequency is often under stated when developing content.
Tip 7) Get to understand the behavior of your customer online. Where do they go? What do they do online? How do they use your site? This requires access to analytics, with a lot of being available for free or almost for free these days.
However, understanding and making sense of the analytics is a lot tougher than it looks, and it’s useful to look for some expertise in this area, unless you have a head for numbers and a deeper understanding of online.
Tip 8) Ecommerce is often used in websites that aren’t fully ecommerce enabled (they may have a limited selection of ecommerce functionality, whereas most of the services or products are purchased offline), and it’s important to understand that ecommerce is a discipline in itself.
If you are transacting online, then be sure to understand how to successfully conduct ecommerce online, and what the challenges are. Do not assume that digital marketing and ecommerce are one and the same, they have overlaps, but the skill sets are varied and often quite different.
Tip 9) Think of how to effectively use video. Video is already big, and it’s only going to get bigger. Video is key these days to effective digital marketing, and the types of video are quite varied from head shot type videos explaining different things to full scale video productions.
A very common form of video on the internet today is motion graphics video.
Tip 10) Get to know UX (user experience) at least a little bit. How do people look at web sites, what are their customer journeys like? More importantly, how do you make it work better and easier for your customers to find what they are seeking on your website?
UX is key to developing successful websites, and either reach out to those who know how to do this, or at least get to learn some of the most common UX lessons for yourself.
There are lots more tips to provide, and therefore this is only a few initial thoughts.
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