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What is a Brand Story? Differentiating Yourself From The Competition

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With all the choices that consumers have in this day and age, just having a good product at a fair price point just isn’t going to cut it. Consumers don’t just care about the product (or service) they’re buying, they care who they’re buying it from, which is why your company’s brand identity is so important to your success. One of the important elements of your brand identity is your brand story. A lot of businesses mistakenly think that this is covered in their “about us” page on their website; however, your brand story is not the same thing as your company history but the goal of a brand story is to create a connection between the brand and the consumer, and to establish the brand’s identity in the minds of consumers. While your company history can be an important part of your brand story, your brand story involves the consumer as much as it involves your company and is absolutely essential in helping you to differentiate your company from your competition.

What Is A Brand Story?

A brand story is the narrative of your brand. It shouldn’t just provide information to the audience about who your company is, it should also tell consumers what your motivations are and should inspire an emotional reaction. For example, while the history of your company can play a role in your brand story, it’s arguably more important why you started the company than how you started it. This helps to get across your mission as well as your core values. Additionally, this allows you to address the consumer as a character in your story. The reason you started the company was to address a certain problem or need that your consumers have, after all.

Learn more about branding: Why Brand Development Matters and How it Works

There are dozens — if not hundreds — of companies that are similar to yours, whether they are competing directly with you or not. These companies may offer similar products that address similar needs to the same target audience. Simply saying that your products or services are better than theirs won’t get you far, even if you’re able to generate content that backs your statements. This is because consumers need to be able to connect with you on an emotional level. They want to relate to the brand that they choose. To do this, you need to differentiate yourself from your competition via your brand story.

A brand story makes it easier for consumers to connect with you due to the fact that storytelling has been an effective way to communicate messages and ideas throughout history. Using storytelling techniques in order to inform consumers about your company is going to make it much easier for them to stay engaged with you. There are several ways that you can do this. For example, you can position your company as the main protagonist whose goal it is to help the consumer or you can position the consumer as the main protagonist who must overcome an obstacle (a problem or need that the consumer has) with the help of your company (a solution in the form of your products or services).

When it comes down to it, creating a brand story helps differentiate your company from your competition while also making your brand more engaging for consumers, thereby making you more relatable on a personal level and more trustworthy as a result.

Creating Your Brand Story

Now that you understand what a brand story is and it’s importance, it’s time to develop your unique brand story:

  • Determine your company’s purpose

    What is your origin story? This doesn’t just refer to the date your company was founded, but why you decided to establish your business. What was your motivation? What is your mission? For example, maybe you realized that customer service within a certain industry was poor and you wanted to provide a better customer experience. Consumers want to know that there’s more to your company’s goals than just profit.

  • Understand who your audience is

    You can’t tell a story without an audience, and you need to know who you’re talking to in order to tell your story effectively. Your story should include your audience as a character, so you must know who your audience is. What are their main challenges, needs, and goals? Knowing this (along with more detailed demographic information) gives you a better understanding of how to tell an engaging story. It’s also why developing buyer personas is particularly helpful when it comes to your brand story.

  • Make sure your brand story remains consistent

    The products and services you sell need to align with your story. For example, if your main goal as a company is to provide an affordable alternative to a luxury product, then you can’t suddenly begin selling high-priced luxury items. Everything you do, from products and services to your marketing efforts, needs to align with your brand story. This means that you also need to maintain the same tone and messaging of your brand story across all platforms. A lack of consistency is going to hurt your brand identity and, in turn, hurt your trustworthiness.

  • Keep it simple

    Simple brand stories are easy for consumers to remember and make it easier for you to maintain consistency. If your story is too convoluted or long, you’ll lose the message and maintaining consistency across platforms becomes more difficult. It will also confuse your audience and help make your competitors’ brand stories appear more clear and well-defined.

  • Be authentic

    Make sure that your brand story actually represents who your brand is. Many companies try appealing to different audiences and adjust their story inauthentically to try making an emotional connection with them. This often happens if you don’t understand who your audience actually is. For example, if you run a clothing line that mostly middle-aged adults purchase but you want to break into the youth market, you might try to spice up your brand story to connect with a younger crowd by using younger slang and referring to pop culture or issues that you think they care about. However, consumers are smart — they can tell if a brand is being inauthentic and it won’t go over well.

  • Be personal

    Appeal to the emotions of your audience. You want them to feel something about your brand story. That’s why it’s important to be authentic about your motivations and your values. You should also make your audience part of your brand story so that it’s more relatable to them.

Your brand story is an important element of your brand identity and helps to emphasize what your brand’s message is. By creating a brand story and aligning your marketing efforts with that brand story, you’ll establish a foundation for who you are and what your company’s purpose is, thereby making it easier for consumers to relate and connect with your brand on a more personal level.

Learn The StoryBranding Process
targeted advertising

How Does Targeted Advertising Work?

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Back before the Internet, it was difficult to escape ads. If you were watching TV, then you had no choice but to watch the commercials. However, because users have more control over what they view online, advertisements are easy to ignore. As a result, marketers are using targeted advertising to expose their ads to users who are more likely to show interest in their products or services. This reduces the chances that someone will ignore the ads. Let’s know more how this targeted advertising actually works.

How Does Targeted Advertising Work?

In order to target an audience that might be interested in a product or service being advertised, advertisers will use data collected on the user. This data can include demographic information as well as behavioral data. For example, if a person views a certain product on a website, their browser will submit this piece of data to third-party advertising networks. That information will be stored in a browser cookie, which is a snippet of code that shows sites that the person has viewed. When the person visits a different website that has the same advertising network, ads for the product the person viewed on the first site may show up. For example, if a person was checking out a new sofa on a furniture website and then visits a social media platform, like Facebook, they might find an ad for the sofa they were just looking at show up on their feed. This is a result of targeted advertising.

How To Create Measurable Social Media Goals?

Types of Targeted Advertising

There are several types of targeted advertising. The following are a few common examples:

  • Social media advertising – Many social media platforms will place advertisements in your feed or on the side of your pages. They have access to a lot of demographic information about its users that can help target different people.
  • Behavioral advertising – Many sites will use past purchasing decisions to advertise to their visitors. For example, Amazon often recommends different products based on the purchasing behaviors of its customers.
  • Search engine advertising – Search engine ads, such as Google AdWords, target users based on their search engine queries to match the keywords they use with those used by their ads.

5 Ways To Optimize Your Social Media

How To Use Targeted Advertising Effectively

While targeted advertising can be incredibly effective in helping you find an audience that has a need for the products or services you’re advertising, it does have one drawback: some people may be put off by the ad if it looks like you’re using personal information about them in order to target your ad. This can come off as an invasion of privacy, after all. Keeping that in mind, the following are a few tips on how to use targeted advertising:

  • Be transparent – Make sure that you let visitors know that you’re collecting data and how you are using that data. The more transparent you are, the less your audience will feel like you’re spying on them.
  • Create control – Although you’ll want to use the visitor data on your site to target your ads, you should provide users with a sense of control by implementing security features, such as SSL certificates, firewalls, DoS, and more. This lowers the chances of someone stealing user information and it helps protect visitors.
  • Don’t use sensitive information – You don’t need to use every bit of information you collect to target your ads. For example, you should avoid using information such as health conditions, race, relationship statuses, and sexual orientation to target ads.
  • Targeted advertising can be an incredibly effective way to market your products and services. This is because it helps you identify audiences that will find your ads relevant. This makes your marketing campaign much more cost-effective as a result.

Learn The StoryBranding Process

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Should You Consider A Growth Driven Design Strategy?

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In this day and age, every business understands the importance of having a company website. Even local mom and pop shops have a web presence, whether it’s a basic website or a social media page. However, not everyone realizes that there are different ways to build your website. If your website is the foundation for all of your online marketing efforts, then consider implementing a growth driven design. It is true that when properly implemented, traditional website designs can still be very effective. However, growth driven designs have their own set of unique advantages worth taking a look at.

What Is A Growth Driven Design?

Traditional websites tend to be designed all at once. Meaning, once the website goes live, it’s finished–everything is complete. Growth driven design involves a more incremental process. It’s not completely finished once it launches.

Instead, you continuously work on the website, implementing design elements based on data collected from visitors interacting with your site. This allows you to design your website from top to bottom based on buyer observations which, thereby, improve your web design over time. Additionally, it prevents design elements from growing stale and eliminates the risk of being stuck with poor design choices.

Similar Article: Growth-Driven Web Design – Is It Right For Your Company?

Growth driven design

The Benefits 

The following are a few of the advantages to choosing a growth driven design:

Eliminate the need for massive overhauls – Traditional website designs often require complete redesigns after only a few years. Because a growth driven design requires that your website be regularly updated, major overhauls won’t be needed.

Meet the needs of your users – While traditional website design certainly makes use of some data, a lot of the design elements will no doubt be based on the personal preferences of those in charge of designing the site. Likewise, they may use elements that a competitor has used to great effect. However, your site design will be more effective if it’s tailored to what your users want, not what you want (or what your competitors use). A growth driven design is a user-driven one.

Launch your website quickly – It can take some time to launch a traditional website design. This is because once it’s launched, it’s done. Since a growth driven design requires consistent work on the website, it’s not expected to be finished once launched. This means that you can get it up and running much quicker.

 Support a goal-oriented strategy – Long-term marketing goals require constant work. Being able to consistently improve your website will make it easier to support the goals that you’ve established.

Make better use of your resources – There are certain choices that you may have made with a traditional website design that you’ll just be stuck with until you do a redesign. This ends up being a waste of resources, whereas with a growth driven design, you can change what’s not working.

Shift, pivot, or adjust on the fly – Not only does a growth driven design make it easy to make needed changes on the fly, it also makes it easy to change course should you shift in regards to your business goals or model.

Similar Article: 6 Web Design Principles to Increase Conversions

Implementation

There are three main stages when it comes to implementing a growth driven design. These stages are as follows:

Growth driven designStrategy – Creating a strategy for a growth driven design is not that dissimilar than creating a traditional web design strategy. You’ll need to identify your goals and what you want your website to achieve. You should also perform extensive research so that you can make as many data-backed decisions as possible in the initial stages of your site design.

Launch Pad – During this stage, you’ll launch a site that looks and performs better than what you have but that isn’t finalized. The launch pad is a foundation on which you’ll build your website. Start with creating a wish list that will help achieve your objectives. Narrow that list down to a list of priorities that need to be implemented from the start.

Improvement – The third stage is never-ending–it’s the stage in which your launch pad site goes live, data collection on visitors begins, features are added, and improvements are made based on that data.

One of the big advantages is the ability to continually adjust your website design based on how users are interacting with your site. This prevents your site from growing stale and makes it easier to meet the needs of your audience. While traditional web designs can still be effective, be sure to consider your website design options by looking into growth driven design as well.

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how to tell your brand story

What Is The Brand Development Process?

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Branding is more than just creating a logo and slapping it on a website or the side of a van. Brand is about a consumer’s perception of your company. A positive perception means that a customer has a sense of quality, value and trust in your company. A negative perception means the opposite. Connecting emotional with a brand takes dedication, a brand leader and relentless following the style guides rules and guidelines. That is why you need to understand the brand development process and how to do it successfully.

Brand development is a multi-stage process with the ultimate goal of building brand equity in a consumer’s mind. Brand equity is an intangible set of assets that cannot be tracked on a balance sheet. But, the value of that equity is the most valuable asset a company can own. Think about Kraft, Amazon, Apple, Will Ferrell or Servpro. What emotional ties do you have with these brands?

The Brand Development Process

Developing a brand must be part of the larger marketing plan for the company. It is often the biggest challenge but the most critical. You don’t have to invest millions to develop your brand, but making the effort will pay off.

The Brand Development Process Demystified 

Determine what you are branding

You can brand almost anything. The most common things are a person, a company, a product or a service. A critical part of the branding process is determining exactly what you are branding, positioning the brand, what you are promising with your brand, your brand story, and your elements and style. This process can be overwhelming, but with the help of a marketing team, you can make it happen.

Research your target market

Marketing research into your target market is critical for effective brand development. It is a step that many startups overlook because they think they know their audience. The reality is that, professional market research will give you critical insights into who the target is, what they like/dislike, what their challenges are, and how you can help them. As I have been doing this for 30 years, not ONE company has ever properly realized their target audience upon the first meeting.

Compile your brand definition

The next step is developing a clear brand definition. This definition can be in the form of a story or statement that clearly reflects what your brand is all about. Your marketing team will help you define what you are offering, how your target audience will benefit from it, what guarantees you offer, and what your unique selling proposition (USP) is. Remember to ask the question, what can this brand do or stand for that no other brand can say?

 

Learn The StoryBranding Process

 

Create your name, tagline and logo

Giving your company a name, a tagline and a logo is the fun part of brand development. But, it is not something you should do without careful thought. Your marketing team can help you determine what name, tagline and logo will resonate with your audience. Nike’s Just Do It! has become a staple of a strong statement just as “It’s Finger Lickin Good” or “Just like a Good Neighbor, State Farm is there”.

Launch the brand

With all the elements in place, it is time to launch the brand. That means creating your first products, offering your services, or making a name for yourself. It could mean many things to many brands like digital campaigns, radio spots, drip campaigns, demographic targeting, print or even showing up at tradeshows. On the surface that sounds easy, but there are many moving gears that need to align to keep the marketing moving forward. The good news is that with all the prep work you did before, your launch will have a great foundation.

Manage the brand

With good up-front work, your brand launch will be successful, gaining momentum as you provide consistent service and quality. Even with a successful launch, you will still need to manage your brand going forward. That is why you need a dedicated team, always monitoring your company’s reputation, doing continuing research, and updating the brand as the market evolves. This step is one that is most ignored when things are running well, but is most important.

These steps will help you and your marketing experts develop a strong brand. The full brand development process takes time. But, look at it as an investment in the company’s future, one that will pay off with dividends for years to come.

I always tell individuals that if your air conditioner breaks, you hire a professional that does it everyday to find the problem and find a cost efficient way of solving the issue. The same theory can be applied to marketing and developing a brand. Marketing companies do it everyday, know the shortfalls and successes, and will have it launched months or years before you could on your own.

 

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Direct vs Indirect Marketing

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You may not realize it, but all marketing efforts can be categorized in one of two ways — direct marketing or indirect marketing. On the surface, direct vs. indirect marketing is relatively easy to understand.

Difference Between Direct and Indirect Marketing

Direct marketing involves engaging with leads or customers directly. For example, sending a customer an email that contains a promotional offer. Indirect marketing is a strategy in which you put yourself in a position to be found by leads. Consequently, allowing them to engage with you instead of just directly engaging them. For example, writing a post on your website’s blog. Which leads can find through external links or through a search engine, is a form of indirect marketing.

Both direct marketing and indirect marketing can be effective strategies. However, to make sure that you implement them effectively, it’s important that you not only understand what the advantages of using each are, but also what the potential disadvantages are of direct vs indirect marketing.

Direct Marketingdirect vs indirect marketing 2

Direct marketing includes a number of traditional marketing strategies that everyone is familiar with. For example TV commercials are a form of direct marketing. So are billboards, magazine ads, radio ads, and telemarketing. That’s not to say that digital marketing can’t be direct. For example, email marketing and PPC advertising are also forms of direct marketing. You’re essentially trying to find and address a specific audience — and you’re trying to get them to take action right away. The following are some of the advantages to such a strategy:

Advantages

  • You can identify specific audience segments, thereby allowing you to connect with people who are likely interested in your product or service already. For example, if you run a TV commercial, you can choose a time slot on a channel that you know your audience is watching.
  • If you know the audience you’re addressing, then you can personalize your messages, thereby allowing you to nurture leads and build stronger relationships. For example, using the data you have to segment your email list allows you to send more relevant content to your recipients.
  • The data you collect from your direct marketing efforts is more measurable. For example, you can track your email response rate to determine how effective your direct marketing strategy is and to make adjustments accordingly.

While there are plenty of advantages to implementing certain direct marketing techniques, there are some potential drawbacks as well. These can include the following:

Disadvantages

  • If you’re too overzealous, your direct marketing efforts may cross privacy boundaries and may even come off as spam, which will hurt your brand reputation.
  • You have to have an understanding of who your audience is and where you can find them. Otherwise, you may be advertising to people who aren’t interested in your brand, which is a waste of time and money.
  • Your overall reach won’t be as widespread since direct marketing requires you to focus in on a specific audience to be effective.

Learn more about indirect marketing strategies

 

Indirect Marketing

Indirect marketing is essentially marketing in which you’re not trying to sell a specific product or service. For example, content creation in the form of a blog of email newsletter are forms of indirect marketing. A lot of social media marketing is indirect as well. For example, if you’re simply engaging in discussions or posting links to informative articles. The idea behind indirect marketing is that you’re nurturing relationships, building brand authority, and generating brand awareness. The following are some of the advantages of indirect marketing:

Advantages

  • You provide value to your customers without coming off as self-serving, which helps to build your brand reputation and increase brand trust.
  • Indirect marketing is typically much less expensive than direct marketing.
  • Indirect marketing is a long-term strategy, which means that your efforts will continue to have an impact throughout the future. For example, you might write a blog post that someone reads years later.

As beneficial as indirect marketing is, there are a couple of disadvantages when compared to direct marketing. These disadvantages include the following:

Disadvantages

  • Tracking performance is more difficult. This is because you’re not honing in on specific customers — you’re casting a wider net.
  • Indirect marketing efforts may not have an instant impact — it may take some time before they begin drawing in new customers. As such, it can be frustrating not to see an immediate impact on sales.
  • Because it’s a long-term strategy, indirect marketing requires constant attention. Whereas direct marketing tactics can work on their own, indirect marketing functions as a whole. This means that you need to be constantly working at it. There’s basically no end in sight.

You are now well aware of the differences between direct and indirect marketing.

As you can see, when it comes to direct vs indirect marketing, both direct marketing and indirect marketing have their share of advantages and disadvantages. Instead of choosing one over the other, the best course of action is to use a combination of both direct and indirect marketing. This will allow you to see both short-term and long-term results, especially if you’re careful when it comes to avoiding the potential drawbacks that both strategies can present when used improperly.

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Choosing HubSpot CRM As Your CRM Solution

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If any business wishes to collect customer data, monitor customer interactions, and ensure that their marketing and sales teams are properly aligned, it is necessary to have a CRM (customer relation management) platform. However, there are a lot of different CRM software solutions to choose from. For good reason, HubSpot CRM tends to be one of the more popular options. The following six reasons are why you should consider implementing HubSpot CRM into your marketing strategy:

Why To Choose HubSpot CRM As Your CRM Solution?

1. HubSpot is Available For Free

When comparing CRM solutions, you’ll find that most of them cost money. Although many of these solutions have free trials or even free versions, they are often limited in their number of usable or accessible features. HubSpot provides its CRM solution for free. While they do have paid versions available with added features, the free version is absolutely packed with features and almost no limitations. For example, your HubSpot CRM platform will be accessible to unlimited users, and stores upwards of one million contacts.

Similar Article: Using HubSpot Lead Flows to Improve Conversion Rates

2. HubSpot is Packed With Features

For a free CRM, you’ll be surprised at the number of beneficial features you can use. These include a standard dashboard, ticketing, tasks, deals, email scheduling, upwards of five email templates, team email, live chat, conversational bots, external form tracking, pop-up forms, company records, contact management, contact and company insights, and more. 

3. HubSpot is Scalable

As expected,  your business will grow over time. Therefore, whatever CRM solution you implement, you should make sure that it can handle significant increases in customer data. Even HubSpot’s free version is capable of doing this. It is, after all, able to handle upwards of one million contacts. This is enough for even the world’s biggest corporations. Should your business expand to the point where you need added functionality, you’ll probably be at the point where your budget has no problem accommodating one of HubSpot’s paid versions.

4. HubSpot Can Be Easily Integrated

Due to HubSpot CRM being designed to integrate with a wide range of applications,  you should have no issue integrating it with your existing marketing technology stack. Some of the other applications that HubSpot CRM can be integrated with include Dropbox, Gmail, Outlook, MailChimp, WordPress, Salesforce, Facebook, and more.

Similar Article: What Are The Benefits of Using HubSpot Marketing Automation Tools?

5. HubSpot is Extremely Intuitive

Next, HubSpot CRM was designed to be user-friendly. Your team members can easily obtain the data and functionality they need, as a result of the intuitive menus containing only the most useful elements. Additionally, the dashboards make it easy to align your marketing and sales goals, along with establishing who is responsible for what, and identifying the current state of your marketing and sales efforts in real time.

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6. HubSpot Will Improve Conversions

Finally, HubSpot provides tools that allow for tracking leads as they navigate your website. You can monitor what actions they take to determine how ready they are to be engaged. In fact, this makes HubSpot particularly effective for both marketing and sales teams. Your sales personnel will be able to identify the highest quality leads, and use information gathered by your marketing team. Subsequently, this will help them nurture the lead and close the sale (such as what products the lead has viewed the most, for example).

Even if you’re running a smaller to mid-sized company, you will not want to go without a CRM platform for long. Implementing a CRM solution is going to make your marketing and sales efforts much more efficient and, therefore, effective. As far as CRM solutions go, you can’t go wrong with HubSpot CRM. This highly advantageous CRM tool understandably continues to be one of the most popular options on the market.

Inbound marketing will help you grow your business by attracting website visitors, converting them into leads and closing leads into customers

Using HubSpot Lead Flows To Improve Conversion Rates

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There’s a common misconception that some businesses that pop-ups are always a bad idea. While it’s true that pop-up ads can be annoying, especially if they are disrupting the visitor’s website experience, they can also be very effective if you know how to implement them properly. For example, you’ll want to refrain from having pop-ups on every page of your site as this will probably annoy your visitors.

However, a strategically placed pop-up can actually make it easier to convert your leads. In fact, a recent study showed that pop-ups convert 1375 percent better than traditional opt-in forms. If you do decide to use pop-ups in an attempt to convert leads, then you should be sure to use HubSpots’s Lead Flow feature.

What Is Lead Flow?

Lead Flows are HubSpot’s version of pop-up ads. Lead Flows can be accessed in both free and premium versions of HubSpot and allow you to create custom pop-ups that will help you to engage visitors, increased web leads, and reconvert returning visitors. Not to mention that through the use of Lead Flows, you’ll also be able to collect contact insights and analytics, making it easier to nurture the leads that you’ve captured.

What Types Of Lead Flows Are There?

There is more than one type of pop-up, and Lead Flows offers a variety of different types that you can customize to fit your needs. This includes the following:

  • Traditional Pop-Up Boxes – Traditional pop-ups are the best way to immediately get the attention of your visitors and are a good way to promote new content offers, grow your email list, highlight specific pieces of content on your site, and to promote your social presence.
  • Drop-Down Banners – Drop-down banners appear as thin, full-width bars near the top of your page. Although direct, they aren’t as disruptive as pop-up ads. They’re great for sales and special offers, growing your blog subscribers list, and promoting upcoming events or webinars.
  • Side-In-Boxes – Side-in boxes are ads that slide in at the bottom left or right side of your page. They’re more subtle than other types of Lead Flows and are effective for promoting content offers or growing your blog subscribers list.

What Are The Benefits Of Using HubSpot Marketing Automation Tools?

What Are The Lead Flow Triggers?

Instead of just having ads pop-up on every page, you can trigger your Lead Flows to appear based on certain actions that the visitor takes. This allows you to pinpoint what actions are more likely to result in a conversion, thereby allowing you to strategically present the visitor with a Lead Flow at an appropriate time. The following are the three types of triggers that you can set for your Lead Flows:website redesign process

  • Browser Exit Trigger – You can trigger the execution of a pop-up Lead Flow when a visitor exits their browser window. This gives you a last chance to capture leads who haven’t converted as they leave your site.
  • Elapsed Time Trigger – You can also set certain Lead Flows to trigger based on how much time the visitor has been on a certain page. The minimum amount of time you can set a Lead Flow trigger to is seven seconds.
  • 50 Percent Page Scroll – Last of all, you can trigger your Lead Flows when a visitor has scrolled past the halfway mark of a page (which shows that they are interested in the content of that page and are more likely to convert as a result).

There are plenty of other customization options available. For example, while pop-ups may be effective for website visitors, they may hurt the experience of mobile users. As a result, you can disable your Lead Flows for mobile visitors. By using HubSpot’s Lead Flows, you’ll also be able to track the leads who have filled out your Lead Flows. This makes it easy to follow up and to develop your strategy to ensure that your leads are being nurtured.

Contrary to popular belief, pop-ups can be effective if they are used appropriately and strategically. The best way to leverage pop-ups is through the use of HubSpot’s Lead Flows feature, which provides a variety of customization options to ensure that you can reach your leads without disrupting their website experience.

Inbound marketing will help you grow your business by attracting website visitors, converting them into leads and closing leads into customers

6 Best Practices For Using Facebook Video Ads

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As you may already know, Facebook Ads can be a very effective advertising platform, especially when you consider its overall cost-effectiveness (it’s a pay-per-click advertising platform, after all) and the ability to target audiences based on a variety of criteria (from demographics to location to interests and more). Facebook Ads has a lot of features that you’ll want to take advantage of, including their Facebook Video Ads feature.

6 Practices For Using Facebook Video Ads

The following are six Facebook Video Ads best practices that you should be sure to implement:

1. Get Your Message Across Immediately

Don’t just assume that your viewers will stick around until the end of your video ads. According to Microsoft, around 19 percent of online viewers lose interest in video content after 10 seconds. Keeping this in mind, it’s a good idea to get to the point as quickly as possible so that your viewers know why they are watching. Try to get your message across in the first ten seconds.

2. Optimize Videos For Lack Of Sound

A lot of people watch videos with their sound off. You want your videos to not only get the message across even if they’re silent, but to engage the viewer to the point that they will turn the sound on. To optimize for the lack of sound, show captions, add text overlay, and be sure to use powerful, moving images.

Video Ad FB

3. Keep Mobile Videos Short

Although some viewers may be more willing to watch a longer video ad on their desktops, this is not so for mobile users. Mobile users are often on the go, which means that they’re not going to have the patience to watch a video that’s minutes long. Try to keep videos under 15 seconds long to help ensure that mobile users actually watch your whole video.

5 Types Of Marketing Videos You Should Think About Using

4. Customize Thumbnail Images

Many Facebook users will turn off autoplay on videos. However, just because some people won’t see your video ads play automatically doesn’t mean that they won’t watch them. You need to spark their interest by choosing a thumbnail image, which is a static image representing your video. Facebook will provide a number of options of still images that it pulls from your video ad. However, you’re not limited to these options–you can also upload a custom thumbnail instead. Make sure the image you use is of high quality and that it’s relevant to your ad.

5. Test Your Video Ads

To make sure your Facebook Video Ads perform to the best of their ability, perform A/B testing. You can create several versions of your video ads through Facebook by changing the creative, the placement, the product set, optimization events, and the audience. Test your ads for three to 14 days to get the most accurate results. Use the results to optimize your video ads so, thereby increasing their chances of performing successfully.

How Facebook Advertising Helps You

6. Analyze Performance

Make sure to analyze your video ads as you run them. The data you collect should help you when it comes to creating future video ads. For example, track which video ads had the highest levels of engagement, what times of the day your audience engaged with your videos, how many viewers visited your landing page after viewing a video ad, which videos were watched from beginning to end, and more.

Considering how effective video marketing is in general, you should be sure to take advantage of Facebook’s Video Ad feature. These are six Facebook Video Ads best practices that you should be sure to take note of before launching a video ad campaign on Facebook.

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Improving User Experience With Good Website Navigation Design

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It’s not a stretch to say that your website is one of — if not the — most important element of your inbound marketing strategy. Without it, there’s very little that you can do. Because of this, it’s essential to make sure that poor web design doesn’t frustrate your visitors. Content quality will not mean as much if visitors have trouble viewing your pages or finding what they’re looking for. This is why you need to make sure you focus on creating a user-friendly website navigation design.

Making Your Website Easy To Navigate

When someone visits your website, no matter how they got there, you’ll want them to spend as much time on it as possible. The more they engage with your site, the easier it becomes to nurture and eventually convert them. As such, you’ll want to make navigation through your website easy. Good website navigation design makes it easy to find links to your site’s main pages, as well as  being able to navigate to those individual pages, conveniently. Awareness Stage

Even if you do have a navigation bar with drop-down menus, it is important to note that most users, today, tend to prefer scrolling.  They’ve become accustomed to scrolling because of the way most social media channels work. Therefore, instead of  visitors clicking through your drop-down menu, a scrollable menu allows them to simply move their mouse over the menu to make it automatically drop-down. This way, they don’t have to click three or four times to get to the page they want to go to. Alternatively, they can just scroll through their options until they find the actual page they want to click on.

It’s a better idea to keep content on one page instead of breaking it up on multiple pages. Even if it’s a long-form piece, forcing the user to click on buttons at the end of each page that says continue to page 2, page 3, etc., is a hassle. Since they have to click to get to the next page, in addition to waiting for that page to load as well. Simply allowing them to scroll through the entire article will make your page more user-friendly.

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Tips for Good Website Navigation Design

The following are a few more examples of how you can create a good website navigation design that will improve your user experience:

Use a responsive design – Your website navigation design may be well thought out for your desktop users, but it may not translate well to mobile devices. This happens due to the fact that most websites use a horizontal design, whereas screens on mobile devices are vertical. By using a responsive design, your navigation menu can be designed to turn into a mobile friendly hamburger-style menu.

Incorporate breadcrumbs – Breadcrumbs allow users to see what links they have followed to get to the page they are on. This makes it easy for them to backtrack to a previous page they were on if they got lost going through your site.

Link logo to your homepage – Make sure that the logo at the top of your page links to your homepage. This makes it easy for visitors to go back to the beginning, without searching for a link to your homepage.

Always display a link to your contact page – Displaying your contact information at the top of your page along with a link to your contact page makes you easier to reach.

Make links easy to click for mobile – Use buttons for CTAs that are easy for people to click on when using mobile devices.

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When designing your website, make sure that you carefully consider your website navigation design. Easy to use and clear navigation will help to improve your user experience, thereby making it easier to keep visitors engaged and on your website.

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Why TV Advertising Remains Effective

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Over the past decade, there has been the perception that inbound marketing tactics, such as publishing blog content and expanding brand recognition by maintaining a strong social media presence, has eclipsed many outbound marketing tactics; however, this isn’t altogether true. Businesses are still having a lot of success with outbound marketing, especially TV advertising. The following are a few reasons why television ads can still play an effective part of your marketing campaign.

People Still Watch TV

While it’s true that many people (especially younger people) are spending more of their time watching streaming services, that doesn’t mean that there’s no audience to reach via TV advertising. Plenty of people still watch TV even though viewership has declined over the past decade. In fact, according to a UK study done last year, people still watch an average of 3 hours and 49 minutes of TV a day.

People Watch Live TV

While streaming services are attempting to build up their content libraries, there is one area in which they still lag behind TV, and that’s in the realm of live TV–specifically, sports. Live sports games broadcast on TV are still an enormous draw and an excellent way to reach certain audiences. Just take for example the Super Bowl, which allows a 30-second ad to reach roughly 100 million viewers. There’s something immediate and social about live TV that few streaming services have managed to replicate.

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TV Can Benefit Inbound Marketing Strategies

The use of TV advertising can actually compliment your inbound activities. For example, you can use hashtags in your ads or display website addresses to encourage viewers to seek out more information online — something that’s easy for viewers to do since they often watch TV with their smartphones or tablets on hand.

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TV Will Never Die, It Will Evolve

Abandoning television advertising simply because you think it’s on the way out is not a good idea. Viewership may be trending down slightly and streaming channels may still be figuring out ways to eclipse their TV counterparts (for example, Amazon recently begun streaming NFL games), but that doesn’t mean TV is dying. An industry as big as TV doesn’t just go away–it evolves.

One of the reasons why streaming services are so popular is because they provide more customizability to their viewers. Viewers get to choose what they want to watch from the content that lives on each streaming platform instead of being forced to watch whatever’s programmed at certain times. TV has been resisting change for some time, but it won’t be long that the way TV works evolves; for example, once channels become available piecemeal (which seems inevitable) instead of grouped in packages, people will have much more control over what they’re paying for. This will also benefit advertisers since you’ll be able to more effectively target your demographics.

These are just a few reasons that you should still be investing in TV advertising as it remains and will most likely always remain an effective marketing technique.

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