Video Content

A Must in Digital Marketing Age

Creating videos for marketing is not new, but it still works as good. Rather, in the digital marketing age, videos have become an excellence medium for marketing, it helps by engaging customers and building brand loyalty.

Right from advertising to explaining the product and features to the customer or creating engaging tutorials, the possibilities with videos are immense.

If you still need some convincing, here’s why you should have videos:

• Video is one of the best forms of customer interaction. It engages the customers auditory and visual senses and captures attention. Customers can instantly connect with the content in the video, and the message can be far more powerfully conveyed, than through a print ad in a banner or EDM.
• Videos help in SEO and social media marketing as well. A good video gone viral can give your brand many times the exposure that you would get through SEO marketing and social media posts.
• Videos also help increase the average time spent on the website. It betters the website rating.
• You can upload your video on various video sites like Youtube, Vimeo, Dailymotion, Metcafe, Hulu, Facebook, Live Leak, Twitch, Vine etc. and along with the perks of video marketing, enjoy backward links.

The Big, Fat Data Forage for

Mobile Marketers

Marketing has evolved leaps and bounds since the days of traditionally defining target markets. It is beyond demographics and definitely beyond macro segmentation. Those were the days when information was limited and marketers hardly knew their customers well. Most marketing was based on surveys and even on marketers’ assumption of customer profile and customer psyche.

In the digital and mobile marketing era, the trouble is that there is so much of customer information available from so many different sources, that marketers are often overwhelmed by this information, and marketing strategy on a whole seems mislaid.

How to best use customer information

The first and foremost thing marketers need to do is access what data is relevant to them and what is not. This, in itself is a mammoth of a job. For instance, all the information about customer’s whereabouts, spending habits, social circle, internet usage pattern, all of this and more is available with marketers. But so much of information does not really mean anything until someone joins the dots and creates insights that actually come in handy as knowledge-base for marketers.

Joining dots, can be a very expensive and time consuming task that a select few big organizations can achieve fully. And when customers start aggregating, the level of precision required and granularity can become quite daunting. To achieve a certain level of datamining, the systems and technology required have to be very sophisticated, and the derivation and the analysis have to be very precise. Achieving this for billions of potential customers out there can be exorbitant and daunting, both at the same time. For small entrepreneurial firms and startups, it makes sense to just focus on the data that is directly relevant. For instance, GeoQpons uses geofencing to get real-time customer location, and based on this information, the app suggests retail stores that have a sale or discount on. Moreover, based on history, the intuitive app suggests stores and merchandise based on customer liking.

Another important insight is that there are no categories. There are fluid lines that pretty much don’t exist. From elders to kids, everyone in the family is making decisions like which car to buy or where to go for holidays, and the worst part being that the marketer does not know who’s the influencer and who’s really the decision maker. So it’s not a simple demographic categorization that would work here but a geodemographic, social breadcrumbs and psychographic analysis, all put together will give some insights about whom to target and how.

Here’s How to ‘Wow’

Your App Users

How well is your app doing? Are your users engaged? How good does your app score on the customer satisfaction index? Is your app’s ‘usage’ ratio high as compared to ‘uninstall’ ratio?

While these are questions that are common in marketing parlance, the real question that actually haunts marketers is ‘how’; how to increase customer engagement, how to avoid uninstalls, how to increase app usage and finally how to ‘wow’ customers?

Although the answer to all these questions lie deep in your offering, the value preposition of your brand, here are some general tips for ‘wowing’ customers.

• Focus on the user’s onboarding experience and the initial interaction with the app. First impressions is the last impression, and it cannot be any truer in this case. Design the whole UX in a way it is simple and fast. Follow the rule of three taps. Anything the user is looking for should be found within three taps.
• Always have an answer, whatever it takes. If the user searches for an item that is not included in the app, present a page that has options of places from where the user can find a similar product.
• And do it fast. Response time in an app has to be extremely quick since app users want answers/solutions fast, if possible real-time, which is why most of them use the app in the first place.
• An app is not about features and sophisticated technology. Those things are important, but more important is the delivery. How well do you deliver solutions that the user seeks? Add the special touch of service when you present solutions to your users. Let a real person do the communication instead of automated responses, provide telephone numbers for assistance, send surprise gifts, send hand written cards, just about anything as a gesture.
• Do not shy away from refunds. By providing a refund you may lose a sale, but gain a customer or even a brand ambassador for life. It is rather intimidating how word of mouth can go viral and a single person can influence masses.