Over 45 percent of consumers online watch at least one video every day on platforms like YouTube, Facebook Video, and others. If you know where to target your video, the rewards can be huge!
In fact, video is such a favored content type among Internet users that 80 percent of traffic is video. In recent years, YouTube’s overall mobile video consumption has increased 100 percent year over year. Needless to say, video marketing is on the rise!
Though more digital marketing campaigns are using video, few brands actually know how to determine whether a video strategy is successful or not. Measuring success is extremely challenging, without analytics. Thankfully, there’s more than a few places to look for info.

How Do You Measure Success in Video Marketing – Look to the Metrics!

What is the ultimate goal of your video marketing campaign?
KPIs are going to tell you a lot about your video marketing. Where viewers are coming from, the length of time they’re watching for, and if they’re clicking through are all key performance indicators readily available.
As a video marketing campaign unfolds, what is the goal of your strategy – this should be clear. Possible goals can be to make a sale, to educate, to increase brand awareness, or to receive website clicks. Once you know what the goal is, you will likely need to monitor a handful of KPIs evaluating how successful your campaign is at arriving there.
How long does a viewer stay tuned to your video?
Look at video engagement metrics like how long a viewer watches your video. This is usually a percentage. Through this you can also calculate average engagement. Now it depends on the type of video you’re publishing but you want viewers to receive as much information and value as there is. Ideally, let’s face it, we all want users who click on the video to watch until the end. This just isn’t possible, unfortunately. No brand has a perfect KPI video marketing here.
What is the most effective video type on YouTube?
The types of YouTube video marketing receiving the most engagement are demonstrations, tutorials, and customer testimonials. ‘Demonstration videos’ are those which focus on showing how a given product or service work. ‘Tutorial videos’ typically provide a step-by-step instruction on how to complete a given task or teaching a skill. ‘Customer testimonials’ have also proven to be very effective in engagement, sharing the experience of current and past customers as they relate to your brand.
How many people can you get to click on your video marketing?
A basic test of how effective a video is relates to how many people actually click on it. In KPI language, this is called ‘rate of play’. If the rate of play is low, you may conclude your video thumbnail isn’t attractive, your video title and description aren’t fully optimized, or what’s discussed in your video is simply not that interesting to your target audience.
To give your video marketing the best chance at getting the most clicks and achieving a high rate of play is to include an impactful thumbnail, to optimize the title and description with keywords, and to publicize it under the right description on social media feeds, email, and your website.
How many views has your video marketing received?
As you may guess, view count on a video is very important. Unfortunately, ‘view count’ is measured a little differently depending on the platform. For example, on Facebook, only 3 seconds of a video is required to be viewed for it to count. On YouTube, a viewer must watch a minimum of 30 seconds before they count under the view count. For this reason, you want to create a compelling video that maximizes every second.
Are you getting click-throughs from your video?
Click-through rate on video marketing campaigns are a critical KPI. Now not every video published may have a clear CTA. This is normal. If you’re launching a campaign however, you want to ensure there’s some sort of clear instruction on what a viewer is expected to do after watching. If the objective of your video marketing is to get customers to click through to your website, this metric counts even more. The higher the click-through rate, the better.
How many social media shares are you getting on video marketing?
In this day and age, a video and content marketing strategy relies heavily on social media shares. If people are sharing your video, that indicates something’s resonating with your audience, exactly what you want. A high rate of social sharing helps with creating brand awareness, increasing your video marketing campaign exposure, and more. For this reason, you want to encourage people to like and share your video with their friends. Let’s say you have 500 social media followers. If each one of those followers has approximately 150 people on their contact lists, assuming every follower were to share your video, that’s a potential 75,000 people your campaign can reach!
How are you measuring conversions with video marketing?
Conversion rate can mean different things i.e. clear leads, prospects, customers, sales, or follows. KPI analysis of conversions can be somewhat tough, for a lot of different reasons. Sometimes conversions go unnoticed and other times, you may get someone partly towards a conversion but due to another reason unbeknownst to you, you’re not getting them all the way there. This measurement isn’t going to tell the full story of where you’re losing video marketing viewers but it will share how many conversations you’ve made.
Consider using live video in your marketing campaign
The average social media user spends three times longer viewing a live video than any pre-recorded content. This means utilizing live video, you are likely to keep your viewers locked in for longer. Needless to say, there’s certainly a time and place for live video in a video marketing campaign. A successful live video component in this sense is going to be one that creates awareness and attention.
Can’t think of what to make a video about? Check your blogs!
If your videos aren’t compelling enough for someone to want to click and watch, that’s a big issue. If you’re not happy with your videos or can’t think of what to make a video about, look to your website blog posts. A lot of brands will upcycle relevant blog posts into video format, alternatively sometimes choosing to adapt a blog to a more emotional storytelling-based video.
Is the message in your video cutting through clear?
Simple videos work best in keeping a user watching and in having the message resonate. Highlighting the sales-friendly benefits of a product or service is easy but it’s not necessarily going to transform a viewer into a customer. A video needs to have more to it than just a sales pitch. Creating purely promotional, aggressive sales videos is a mistake. See it from a member of your audience’s perspective and then, ask yourself the following questions.

 Who is your video for?
 Does the person watching feel like they can relate to your message?
 What problem are you solving in the video?
 What is your CTA?
Identify the ideal length, video type, and filming format
There’s a market out there for a variety of video types. You can film it on your iPhone and have your video generate results. In other cases, something filmed in a high-end studio will resonate. Similarly, there’s an audience out there for 40-second videos, just like there is for videos a full hour in length.
Our best advice in deciding what kind of video marketing you’ll make in length, camera, and more is to do your research. Every brand might be a little different. Depending on what your aim is for your video marketing campaign, you want videos that will suit those goals accordingly. Consider looking at competitors to see what they’re doing and check out what’s already successful in your video category on sites like YouTube. There’s a wealth of ideas out there!
Source: https://unlimitedexposure.com/basic-digital-marketing/1107-how-do-you-measure-success-in-video-marketing-%E2%80%93-look-to-the-metrics.html

Social causes as a form of marketing is a controversial subject, with some describing it as misleading and manipulative. Regardless of what one’s take on using charity or a social cause marketing, there’s no questioning its effectiveness with younger generations.

Why Using a Social Cause to Connect to Your Millennial Audience is Still a Smart Approach

Why we do it

Social cause marketing is believed to have begun in the mid-1970s through a joint campaign between the Marriot Corporation and the March of Dimes. The Marriot promoted their family entertainment complex in California while raising funds for the March of Dimes cause, which succeeded at promoting the corporation as well as the cause. Since then, so many others have followed suit with joint charity campaigns. In this era of increased consumer awareness and interest in causes such as the environment, brands win major points when they engage.

What is your brand doing?

Millennial consumers don’t just want to buy from a corporation that dehumanizes its customers down to a number or profit margin. They want to know more about the brands they’re spending on and supporting. Is your brand doing anything to make the world a better, kinder place? Deepen loyalty with your audience base with an investment in a social cause. Show the world your business isn’t just about turning a profit, and that it’s got some real values and a mission behind it.

What happens to a brand who promotes a social cause?

More than two-thirds of millennials say their perception of a brand improves when said brand supports a social cause they approve of. Although you don’t want to appear boastful or as if you’re beating your chest over any charity accomplishments, strategic publicity of a cause or charity can be integral to setting up your company for success. In digital marketing, content marketing, and social media marketing, you don’t always want to be selling. You’ve got to say something meaningful. A social cause may be the piece you’re missing.

Does social cause marketing work to attract consumers?

More than half of consumers this year will buy from a brand that supports a social cause. The percentage of consumers who value a brand that supports a social cause has grown with each passing year, since 2010. Up to 87 percent of consumers are also likely to switch brands if one brand is aligned with a social cause, if price and quality are equal. This is because consumers believe when a company donates some of its profits to a worthy cause instead of their bottom line, that company’s more deserving of one’s consumer dollar. Social cause marketing is a very simple idea but it works.

What social cause should my brand support?

If it’s not obvious what social cause marketing could work for your brand, give it some thought. There are a number of social causes that are extremely popular with millennial audiences, including brands playing a role in development in underdeveloped parts of the world and environmental or eco-friendly causes. You may also choose to do something smaller and localized, offering to raise money for a charity cause in your own community. Promoting charity initiatives and social causes like this reflect extremely well on a business, and give insight into what’s important.

How can my brand use social cause marketing?

There are many ways you can employ social cause marketing. A lot of brands won’t ask for anything from their consumers, other than to support the same cause that you support. Some brands are a little more involved though with a number of approaches. For example, you can offer a donation with purchase, provide a link or offer to consumers to join your campaign and supporters, a ‘buy one, give one’ campaign, hold a volunteerism rally, offer a way to donate, consumer pledge drive, or a request for consumer action.

Choosing a non-partisan, inoffensive cause

As a small to medium sized business, or a start-up company, you don’t want to immediately disregard consumers who don’t share the same political view as you. Choosing a side between liberal and conservative, or a political ideology of any kind, is wrong. To this point, you shouldn’t appear partisan. It’s much more advantageous and kind to be non-partisan, and to choose a social cause that does not carry political controversy with it.

Consumers are expecting more from brands

It’s not enough now just to do good business. Cause marketing’s a great approach at communicating there’s more to your company than simply making money. Once a brand has influence, power, or a platform, it’s time to use it for positive means. You can publish your efforts through digital marketing, giving you more to talk about than your products or services. Social causes convert big in email, social media, and content marketing. If you can show you’re trying to change the world for the better, it almost creates a type of gravity that brings in consumers.

Write about it in blogs and articles regularly

Content marketing in blogs and articles should promote a social cause on a schedule. This isn’t saying every blog should include a mention of your social cause. While you’re writing about a variety of topics related to your products or services, don’t hesitate to add an article detailing issues you’re trying to solve, a charity you support, or what your brand’s doing to make the world a better place. After all, if you don’t talk about your efforts, who will – you’ve got to make publicity!

Don’t just write, take photos often

If your social cause has you attending events locally or even if it’s creating action elsewhere in the world, get photos and videos if you can. A picture truly does paint a thousand words and tagged right, you can send an image all over social media on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and on communities like reddit. A video marketing social cause campaign you can also publish on platforms like YouTube and Facebook. These should be professionally taken images, although they don’t have to be perfect. Images give you more content to use.

Why video marketing is so important to a social cause

What form of content marketing has the highest ROI – you guessed it, video. Accumulating and producing videos to share on social media and different platforms, including your website, doesn’t have to be complicate. Even a 15-second or 30-second clip can tell a beautiful story. Video storytelling can be central to tapping into emotion and because of the manner it’s produced, video is something that can be reused again and again. It builds goodwill, is cost-effective, and the ROI is compellingly high.

A loyalty building strategy

Brands that use social causes create loyalty among audiences. The more loyalty you foster, the greater the likelihood it is a consumer will choose you over a competitor. This loyalty doesn’t originate from price point, a product release, or innovation. It’s all about communication. Like-minded individuals naturally form community. Social causes bring people together. Use this.

What’s a basic social media marketing campaign for social causes?

Set up accounts for your brand on the major social platforms you intend to use. Then, commit to a post of at least once a day on all platforms. Not every post needs to relate to a social cause you support however it is good to stick to a regular plan. You may wish to mention your social cause once a week, or more or less frequently depending on the time of year and what you’re promoting. Content can be used from your site, coming in the form of blogs, video, images, or infographics. Plan ahead as to what areas your content will focus on. This is a basic social media marketing campaign for social causes.

Are you looking for high quality digital marketing to promote your social cause? Unlimited Exposure would love to help.

Source: https://unlimitedexposure.com/basic-digital-marketing/1106-why-using-a-social-cause-to-connect-to-your-millennial-audience-is-still-a-smart-approach.html

Wait, do I have bad SEO? This is a question a lot of web designers, entrepreneurs, and business owners ask themselves. If you do find this to be the case, don’t worry. Though bad SEO has consequences long-term, the quicker you make a change, the closer you’ll to deriving some benefit from your strategy.

This Article Will Help You Turn Around Bad SEO into an Optimized Website in 12 Easy Steps

What is bad SEO?

Bad SEO can be happen out of clumsiness or lack of experience, more common than not. Alternatively, bad SEO can also happen with so-called ‘experts’ who use black hat SEO techniques. Black hat SEO are outdated strategies used to ‘hack’ SEO and often involve illegal means of ranking your site higher. In almost every case, black hat SEO strategies are eventually discovered and when they are, a site gets penalized. If you find your site has bad SEO, it’s no reason to panic.

What is white hat SEO?

White hat SEO is high quality content, using keyword clusters that are on-brand, and wrapped in a visually appealing website. White hat SEO, to put it succinctly, is the good kind of SEO and adheres to Google guidelines. This is what you want. To get you started on optimizing your site in 12 easy steps, we look to white hat SEO practices to cover strategies you may be using that are outdated, cheating, or considered low quality.

Is your website your best work?

Web design isn’t meant to be rushed through. If you’re not committed to making the best site possible for your brand, you are unlikely to see the big returns some sites do. In this vein, a high quality website doesn’t just get the technical aspects of SEO right but it engages, sparks some magic, contributes value, and has a reason to exist.

Step 1 – How many times do you use your keyword?

A lot of websites overstuff keywords in with no relevance. Content can appear clunky when you do this. You need smooth, easily readable content that blends in keywords naturally. Instead of stuffing in the same keyword again and again, slow it down. Instead, choose 3 or 4 keywords. Blend them in naturally, only once or twice in a short piece of content. The ultimate goal’s not necessarily to maximize keyword usage but it is to deliver high-value content.

Step 2 – Prioritize unique, eye-catching high quality content

SEO is built around content marketing, such as how-to articles, blogs, opinion pieces, and informational blogs. Your content shouldn’t be duplicated from anywhere else on your site or elsewhere on the Internet. It should also be written well and something that users are going to appreciate. It shouldn’t be promotional or sales-focused. Give it some real value! If your content is good enough, it will sell the reader on the idea of buying from your business.

Step 3 – How do I know what SEO keywords to use?

Keyword are important. Keywords in SEO should relate to your business. Choose long and short keywords. Look at keywords that are going to build you authority in your category of the marketplace. Researching these can take a lot of time but the work does pay off if you choose correctly.

Step 4 – Eliminate any spam or duplicate content

If you have duplicate content, remove it because you will be penalized in the eyes of Google. Secondly, if anyone is leaving spam links, irrelevant comments, or similar content, a site’s reputation can become damaged in the eyes of Google. Don’t let this irrelevant content affect your site ranking. There are a number of tools, apps, and built-in tools to use to help manage comments and duplicate content like this.

Step 5 – Does every page have a purpose?

Look at your site. If there are blogs written that don’t have a strong purpose, plagiarized or borderline duplicate, or are pages you don’t need, get rid of them. An efficient website is one where every page deserves to be there. A stronger website like this suggests to search engine crawlers you are a high quality site.

Step 6 – Do you have clickbait articles with a high bounce rate?

Clickbait can work in some cases to get you clicks. If you don’t deliver though, you’re going to lose a user and they may not ever come back. Luring people onto your site through misleading, deceptive language isn’t ok. It may not punish you in the form of search engine rank but you won’t win any customers this way. By all means, avoid clickbait. Instead, write better and create more engaging content marketing.

Step 7 – Do you have an internal and external linking structure?

There’s a dual approach any excellent SEO website takes. There’s external links which you can’t really control which is when other websites recognize the value in your website and they link directly to it. Then, there’s internal linking structure which involves you linking to other pages on your website, setting up 2-4 internal links per article or blog. Doing this interlinks your website, communicating relevancy, authority, and quality.

Step 8 – Incorporating SEO images

SEO images, video, graphics, and media keeps a user engaged, and ups the quality of your content. When you have images or video, ensure they have been optimized with meta data, descriptions, and the incorporation of keywords. Search engine crawlers cannot discern what’s included in an image and so you need to tell them through meta data what’s there. Doing this will help them classify it and can in fact be an opportunity to further elevate your website’s rank.

Step 9 – Is my website mobile responsive?

There are more users surfing the Internet today through mobile devices – i.e. smartphones and tablets – than there are people doing it on laptops and desktops. A website that’s mobile responsive adapts to screen size, shifting around elements and ensures a user never needs to zoom in. Responsiveness makes browsing a website so much easier! It’s also so important to SEO that Google and other search engines have adapted a mobile-first approach. A website that isn’t mobile responsive ranks lower than one that is. If you haven’t already, get your site formatted to be mobile ready.

Step 10 – Are my website pages loading fast enough?

Page speed in SEO must be optimized to rank high. Search engines like Google value loading speed very much, which has made it a priority for web designers and digital marketers. As we continue to design, and add images, video, media, and graphics to our web pages, it can slow things down. You’ve got to have a firm grasp on web coding and design to ensure your page doesn’t take longer than 3 seconds to load.

Step 11 – Look at your analytics

In changing your website’s design, removing bad SEO and replacing it with good SEO, pay attention to your analytics in the weeks to follow. SEO rank changes take time to happen but you’re likely to notice other changes including a lower bounce rate, more clicks through your website, and overall indications of an improved user experience. Analytics give a wealth of information on a website’s performance, well worth perusing to see if your efforts are making a difference.

Step 12 – Coming up with a long-term SEO plan

SEO is all about ongoing effort. If you do everything right today and fine-tune your bad SEO into something turned around, it still takes long-term planning to elevate your site to the rank you deserve. SEO is an investment in best practices, eliminating what’s outdated, obsolete, or not working. Planned activity on your site, such as through content marketing and blogs, directly impact SEO. Search engine crawlers will come back to crawl your website somewhat regularly ensuring its’ pages are still quality enough to rank where they do. A long-term SEO marketing strategy’s necessary for this reason.

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KPI stands for ‘Key Performance Indicator’. They provide insight into how well a digital marketing campaign is working, measuring performance in very specific ways. On more complex campaigns, there are dozens and sometimes hundreds of KPIs being tracked. As you set up a strategy for your brand, knowing where to start with KPIs and what to choose count for a lot.

What is a Digital Marketing KPI and How to Choose Yours

How important are KPIs in digital marketing?

KPIs can refer to any aspect of a digital marketing strategy, ranging from productivity to sales, revenues, consumer behaviour, and more. KPIs are important in digital marketing because numbers matter. If you launch a strategy that you don’t know whether it’s working or not, continually spending money on it could be going down the wrong path.

If KPIs aren’t producing the results you desire, you can adapt strategy or figure out where the problem is. For this reason, the KPIs you choose for your digital marketing campaign is highly important. Choose the wrong KPIs and you won’t have the information you need to make an informed decision on whether a given strategy is producing or not.

Keys to a healthy collection of KPIs

You won’t just be choosing one KPI to determine a strategy as a success or failure. Quality over quantity though. Choose metrics and KPIs that are clearly attached to a written out objective or target. You want objective data and ideally, a forecast for what you expect the data to be as well as where you want the numbers to go in the future.

Link every KPI you choose to an action. For example, revenues as a KPI is tied to the action of a sale. If a KPI’s focused on page visits, the action is then to provoke a customer click on a page whether that click’s coming through social media, email, SEO, or elsewhere. Alongside action-oriented KPIs, stick with a regular schedule of reports and reviews.

Focus on good business, not website traffic

As entrepreneurs, we like to know we’re doing good. We want our strategies to work. Unfortunately, this oftentimes leans to some looking at KPIs targeting upwards in an effort to find the good in the bad. This is completely the wrong approach.

The correct approach with KPIs is to focus on what actually matters – customers and healthy business. If you’re excited about website traffic numbers, page views, or visitor rates, if this isn’t achieving concrete sales or revenues, or are hitting on an objective directly, they count for nothing.

Eliminate vanity metrics

Vanity KPIs are those which don’t tell you a lot about the achievement of your objectives. As mentioned, page views and impressions are vanity. Even though we want those numbers up, rightfully so, they shouldn’t be at the center of a campaign.

You don’t keep yourself in business through page views – you do it through sales. Conversions aren’t vanity KPIs. Look at sales. When they get low, you can then dig into other KPIs or data measurements to find out why. You may see a problem on your website, in your link, in emails, or in your social media, or elsewhere.

Conversion rates can differ

Some digital marketing campaigns have conversion rates which aren’t focused on sales or revenues, but rather maybe they want to increase followers on social media, up their email subscriber list, or increase visibility on their website. Before you dig into your KPIs, know what your conversion is going to be. It can virtually be anything, from clicks on a page to a sign-up or like. How are you framing campaigns – you can have multiple conversion rates, of course. Know everything you’re chasing by identifying conversions.

Choose more than ‘revenues’

KPIs aren’t just about going straight to revenues or sales, either. Whether you’re generating massive sales or they’re way low, do you know why your revenues are the way they are – you should.

KPIs and data analytics in digital marketing give a lot of insight into customer behaviour and revenues. Use these numbers. You may find opportunities to lower cost of customer acquisition, increase customer retention rates or re-purchasing, increase average customer sale value, and more. Those opportunities do exist, even if your website’s doing absurdly well! Where you find opportunities like this all starts with getting into all the numbers on KPIs and analytics.

KPIs help to better understand customers

You may think you know your customers but, do you really – check your KPIs and analytics. Throughout the data you collect, you can oftentimes tell where traffic is coming from, what marketing channels are working, where you’re losing customers, and you can find out what they’re doing or not doing. Just like we’ve mentioned, the more information you have, opportunities suddenly may present.

An effort to monitor short-term and long-term performance

Do not wait until the end of the campaign to check your KPIs. Check them routinely throughout. This gives you the chance to make a change or make informed decisions on a strategy while you still can. There are short-term goals and long-term goals to achieve, in an average digital campaign. Key performance indicators allows you to adjust targets and achieve targets in intelligent form, with strategies that are well-funded.

An example of an email marketing KPI plan

Email marketing produces significant return on investment in digital marketing. They drive high levels of traffic, produce strong conversion numbers, and is a healthy way to reach consumers with effective, personalized marketing.

How do you measure an email marketing campaign with KPIs? Well, these are the KPIs to start with – conversions, return on investment (ROI), click-through rate, open rate, click-to-open rate, language diversity, unsubscribe rate, spam complaint rate, delivery rate, bounce rate, site traffic, subscriber list growth, sales and revenues, and brand awareness. This is an average collection of KPIs for email strategies, though there are several others which could be used. You don’t necessarily have to use these but they are pretty well on-point to measuring success or failure through email marketing.

Where to invest your money with KPIs

The simple guide to smart spending in digital marketing is to spend on channels with the highest ROI. It’s a big mistake to channel strategies that focus on channels that aren’t going to satisfy objectives. Sometimes, it takes KPIs to know what channels are working and which aren’t.

There’s also something to be said for the mutual support between channels in guiding a sale. A consume passing through your sales funnel may touch upon 2 channels or more. This presents argument that one may want to be careful about where they’re cutting funding. Subsequently, you’ll want to pay close attention to your metrics, ensuring you’re not cutting down a channel, strategy, or approach that could be support despite being an under-performing channel.

The right KPIs are objective and inarguable

The best idea wins the day – that’s the democratic way, essentially, and KPIs produce numbers you can’t argue with. After choosing your KPIs, recognize they’re objective in measuring a strategy’s success. Until a campaign’s launched, all the arguments in the world can be had around what’s right and wrong. The numbers will tell you straight what works or doesn’t.

Let’s say, for example, you’ve launched a campaign and it isn’t working. Don’t be prideful in continuing on a path that’s only going to lead to your disappointment. If your KPIs are communicating what you’ve planned isn’t working, maneuver and pivot to something new. Regardless of what your brand is, what you’re selling, and what the objective is, chances are, there’s a way to make it work. KPIs are your guide. Use them regularly and follow the numbers.

Are you looking for high-performance results-guaranteed digital marketing in Toronto, Ontario, Canada – Unlimited Exposure’s the team to call. Let us take your brand to the next level. One phone call is all it takes.

Source: https://unlimitedexposure.com/basic-digital-marketing/1104-what-is-a-digital-marketing-kpi-and-how-to-choose-yours.html