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The Content Connection

26 Jul 2016
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5 Foundations of Approachable Content Marketing

Sticky Post By On July 26, 2016 With No Comments

Whether you’re looking to improve your brand awareness, increase engagement, or build brand loyalty, creating a more approachable persona through your content marketing can help. But where do you start? You need to begin with the five foundations of approachable content marketing.

1. Knowledge

To start laying a foundation of approachability you must know your audience. When you know your audience, you can present yourself (and your content) in a way that’s most appealing to them. It can be helpful to create documented buyer personas to keep the different segments of your target audience straight. If you take the time to get to know your audience and then use that knowledge to create great content, your audience will find your content more useful and relevant, which will get you more shares.

2. Interaction

If you want folks to engage with you online, you need to make the first move by engaging with them. Be visible with blog posts (or case studies, eBooks, etc.—whatever content your audience is hungry for), emails, smart SEO and an active social media presence. Your goal isn’t to broadcast your content but to create conversation and keep the exchange going.

Show that you’re paying attention by responding when someone comments on a blog post. Answer questions and show how you’ve incorporated their feedback. If your audience engages with you on social media, acknowledge them. Encourage user submissions in the form of guest blog posts, product reviews, and video testimonials. Use all the channels at your disposal to keep the conversation alive and connect in an authentic way. Every interaction should be about building brand affinity and loyalty.

3. Transparency

Transparency is a key part of approachability. If you act like you’ve got something to hide, people won’t trust you and may even back away slowly before they break into a run in the opposite direction. On the other hand, if you’re open about what you do, how you do it, and why, people are more likely to feel comfortable around you.

Tell the story of why you love what you do in a way that shows your human side and the values that are most important to you. Illustrate the ways you give back to the community. Share about your business practices, including where you fall short and how you plan to improve. Be open about how you’re incorporating customer feedback.

4. Consistent & Positive Brand Voice & Tone

Who are you? What is your brand about? Be clear on that and translate it into every piece of content—every blog post, every eBook, every email, every social media post—in a way that’s positive, conversational and economical. When you’re consistent in the way you express yourself, your audience will feel they know who you are, which increases their comfort level with you. What’s more, positivity draws people in. So just as you’d say it with a smile, write it with a smile!

5. Relevant, Useful Content

Nothing invites us to engage like content that speaks directly and clearly to our needs and wants. If you’ve taken the time to interact with your audience, you’ll find that you’ve gotten to know them well and have collected plenty of topics for the types of content they want, be it whitepapers, case studies, or how-to videos.

If you put these five foundations into play with your content marketing, you’ll be in a good place for building awareness, engagement, and loyalty with your target audience.

Do you have a recent example of approachable content marketing from your own work or other brands? Share it in the comment section below. Or feel free to leave feedback on this post and how we can continue providing content that’s useful to you.

Learn more about Filament and how we can help make your content marketing more approachable.

22 Jul 2016
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Social Media Transparency: “Behind the Curtain”

Sticky Post By On July 22, 2016 With No Comments

With a clearly defined brand voice in place, the easiest way to continue to build trust and loyalty amongst your customers is by pulling back the curtain on the inner workings of your day-to-day operations through social media transparency.  

It’s important to first differentiate between being authentic versus transparent.  Being authentic is utilizing your brand voice to be consistent and approachable when engaging with your customers on social media.

Social media transparency builds on the authentic nature of your brand by sharing your company’s values and practices in an open and honest manner.  Being transparent not only builds trust and loyalty with your current customers but also helps to inform and empower potential customers to make better buying decisions by providing information they need in an accessible and easily digestible way.

Balance Is Key

Transparency is about finding the balance between corporate speak and over-sharing. It’s important to set the boundaries with what you are comfortable sharing as a company and align that message in a way that stays true to your brand voice.

The information you do share with your social audience should be clear and consistent, set in a professional and polished tone. Help educate your customer on the inner workings of your company in a thoughtful way.

Patagonia has long been a leader in creating high-quality products that have a clean environmental footprint.  They take their mission one step further on their social channels by educating their customers about environmental issues important to them and leading the way to inspire their fans to easily take action in implementing positive change.

Make Your Brand More Personal

Show them a typical day in your office, introduce them to your company and the people who they interact with—for example your customer service and social media teams.  

Don’t be afraid to put a face to your brand.  Everlane has extended their ‘radical transparency’ brand message to Snapchat by introducing the people behind their social team.  With each Snap they are working to convert fans into customers by sharing information regarding their factories and pricing structure, while simultaneously encouraging their customers to ask them the tough questions.

Know Your Audience

Before posting to any of your social channels think of your audience’s reaction.  What interests them?  Is it a Facebook Live Q&A about your latest product?  Or a behind-the-scenes Snapchat tour of the production process of your goods from the factory to the floor.  

Your audience is social savvy and smart.  Be sure to invest in your audience by providing information that not just entertains but also informs. The goal is to produce authentic and transparent social content that helps to build an enduring relationship with your customer.

Listen

One of the best benefits of social media is the immediate feedback your followers will give you.

Be open and honest with your customers, then listen to their reactions.  By creating and maintaining a consistent open dialogue with your fans they will provide invaluable insight.  Be sure to respond to all comments, good and bad.  By acknowledging that you are listening to both their praise and concerns is a huge opportunity to leave a positive lasting impression on a customer.

Publically Acknowledge Mistakes

Customer service is key.  Again, go out of your way to respond to every comment your receive. One of the greatest benefits of social media is the ability to right a wrong publically and immediately.  Each interaction with customers should be laying the foundation for brand affinity and loyalty.

Don’t be quick to hit the delete button on negative comments, instead use that as an opportunity to do the right thing and make the customer not only happy but leave a lasting impression with the hope of creating a customer for life.

 

Pull back the curtain on your company’s values and practices to extend the relationship you have with your customer and build trust.  Social media transparency provides a unique opportunity to create a genuine and long lasting relationship with your customers.

Contact the Filament team today to ensure your brand is creating authentic and transparent social content every day.

19 Jul 2016
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SEO & Personalized Search

Sticky Post By On July 19, 2016 With No Comments

As a consumer you’ve come to expect personalized search engine optimization (SEO) from companies, whether you realize it or not. Imagine it’s morning and you need a coffee but you’re racing to get to an appointment. You speak into your phone and ask for Starbucks drive thru. You expect your phone to instantly give you a few options that are nearby. You certainly don’t want a Wikipedia page on Starbucks or a listing for coffee shops in a different city or state. You want your search to be personalized to what you want without you having to specify what that is. Actually, let’s take a moment to appreciate how remarkable that is and yet we expect it.

If you want to reach your audience, you’re going to need to learn to feed the machine that gives those personalized search results.

 

Location, Location, Location

Unlike real estate, we really don’t care where your location is, we just want you to mention it. Mention it a lot and make it prominent. It sounds crazy but quite a lot of businesses don’t mention their basic who/where/what enough. Make sure your company name and location is on every page so people can find you. Also make sure it’s easy to find on your social media accounts. Try a test: have friends search and see if they can find your location from your page within 30 seconds. Then see if they can find it in 10 seconds. 

 

Local Keywords

We simply love keywords at Filament. Keywords are the foundation of your success but you, of course, must be using accurate keywords that not only reflect your business or what you offer but also your location. Work your location into your website in the header, the footer, the content.

 

Register Your Website

Take charge and actively register with search engines rather than letting them find you, this way you know they’ve got your location. Google Business should be your first stop, then hit all the others.

 

Link Building

Ah yes, the dreaded link building. Actually, in this situation it’s a wonderful tool and you can directly benefit from doing it correctly. Build your local business by reaching out to local organizations and groups and becoming affiliated. Do you love animals? Then link to the local animal shelter and offer customers a chance to donate. Join your local business organizations and link to them and ask them if they have a member directory where they can link to you. It’s this sort of local link building that’s going to earn a solid standing with the search engines.

 

MOBILE!

Be mobile. Remember mobilegeddon from 2015? If your website isn’t mobile and doesn’t convert for users on the go, then you can be in serious trouble. It’s vital to get a website that either converts beautifully and responsively or get a separate mobile website. Local searches often come from mobile devices and by not having a mobile site or not being user friendly, you can basically kiss those customers good-bye.

 

The overwhelming concept here is that the search engines, Google in particular, want to give searchers what they want; whether that is by delivering a product, a service, information — anything. Quite often searchers want something that is local (not always, of course) and the search engines are finding ways to deliver. Personalized search is not just about local and location, but this is a prime place to start. Contact Filament for more information and for help optimizing your website.

13 Jul 2016
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Brand Love & Email Approachability

Sticky Post By On July 13, 2016 With No Comments

Consumers distrust corporate brands, yet trust is important for building strong relationships with customers. One way to cultivate trust in the face of such mistrust is to make your marketing more approachable, starting with your email marketing.

What makes email marketing more approachable? It starts with knowing your audience well and moves beyond email to how you interact with your target audience on other platforms.

Audience

In order to up your email approachability, you need to know what your subscribers want, what they care about, what problems they face day to day, the language they use to talk about those problems, what devices they’re using to interact with your emails, how often they want to hear from you, what topics they’re interested in reading about—in short, you need to know everything about them. This knowledge is key for the rest of the steps toward making your emails more approachable.

Brand Voice

Your goal is to create an approachable brand persona that people know, understand, identify with, and relate to. You want to not only convey integrity, reliability, and authority, but also friendliness, optimism and empathy.

Be real.

Speak in the language your customers use. Care about what you’re saying, make sure it’s useful, and take the time to say it well.

Stay positive.

Nothing’s as inviting as positivity. Keep your content positive. Keep your interactions with your subscribers positive. In part, this means making it easy for folks to unsubscribe should they want to. Don’t hide your unsubscribe button or make subscribers go through the process of logging in to their account in order to unsubscribe.

Show integrity.

As the age-old saying goes, honesty is the best policy. In terms of email marketing, this starts with subject lines. If your subject line speaks to a specific topic, make sure you address that topic in the body of your email. If your email includes links, make sure subscribers are driven to the right page for every link.

Write economically.

Say what you need to say with the fewest words possible.

Say it straight.

Approachability is about being friendly and easy to talk to. You want to emulate that in your content by making it clear, straightforward and simple—but not simplistic.

Transparency

Transparency doesn’t mean you have to be an open book about every aspect of your business. Instead, when done well, it lets your customers know you’re human. It shows them that you share their values, which is a big driver of trust.

Share the story of your brand and why you do what you do, including your brand values. Include information about your business practices to show customers they can confidently expect honest dealings with your company.

Accessibility

Being approachable also means it’s easy to access and engage with your content. This step requires images that load quickly in the email clients and on the devices your subscribers use. If your subscribers use mobile devices, it means making your emails mobile friendly.

Personalization

When we talk about personalization, we’re thinking beyond just addressing your subscribers on a first name basis. Instead, personalization means crafting your content specifically to your target audience. It’s about relevance. Craft content that speaks directly to the issues your audience cares about and then use segmentation to get that content to the right people on your list.

Beyond Email: Social Media

Make it easy to your audience to interact with you beyond email. Offer ways in your emails to keep the conversation going on social media. Then, be present and active on social media networks, listening to feedback and responding thoughtfully.

Creating a more approachable persona through your email marketing will go a long way toward growing love for your brand. It helps increase engagement and build brand trust, which is key for cultivating loyalty and commitment. This, in turn, leads to bigger purchases, higher levels of repurchase, cross-selling, and referrals.

Got a story about email approachability? We’d love to hear it. Share it in the comments section below.

Get in touch with Filament today to get help crafting email content that creates an approachable persona for your brand.

11 Jul 2016
Sticky Post By Posted in CONTENT MARKETING With 1 Comment Permalink

Content Marketing Transparency & Personalization

Sticky Post By On July 11, 2016 With 1 Comment

The best relationships are built on trust and grow into loyalty. This truism applies to personal relationships as well as to business relationships and the relationships we have with brands. Thankfully, content marketing offers an unparalleled opportunity for building trust and loyalty with two key strategies: transparency and personalization.

Transparency

Transparency offers a unique way to connect with your customers by cultivating a culture of openness. Content marketing transparency practices can include disclosing your production processes, sharing the materials or ingredients you use and where they come from, listing your costs and pricing, and making your revenue and income information readily available to the public.

Why move toward transparency? According to a 2014 Nielsen study, 55% of shoppers are willing to pay more for products and services geared toward positive social and environmental change. Even if you’re not working for change, you can still benefit from transparency in content marketing because transparency also builds trust and loyalty.

A smart way to employ transparency in your content marketing is via storytelling. People want products with a story they can feel good about. Whether you’re telling the story of where your ingredients come from or the factory where your goods are made or all the lessons you’ve learned with your business thus far, transparency is an opportunity to connect with consumers whose values align with your own and to show the human side of your brand.

What might transparency look like for your business? You might start by sharing your business practices on your website, acknowledging where they fall short and what you’re doing to improve them. Or perhaps you provide an option for product reviews on your site, offering transparency in your customer’s experience. If you take this route, be sure to address reviews—both positive and negative—in ways that show you care about feedback and that you’re using it to improve your products and services.

Here’s a brief list of additional content marketing transparency ideas with examples:

Ingredient transparency (Weleda)

Weleda content marketing transparency

 

Pricing transparency (Everlane)

Everlane content marketing transparency

 

Sourcing transparency (Stumptown)

Stumptown content marketing transparency

 

Production transparency (Tata Harper)

Tata Harper content marketing transparency

 

You can build transparency into your content marketing in any number of ways. Just be sure it’s adding value for your customers by making your content more useful and more relatable.

Personalization

Personalized content is tailored and targeted to specific individuals. It’s a key way to build trust and loyalty with your brand since it helps you deliver relevant, usable content.

The first step to personalizing your content marketing is to learn as much as you can about your audience. This knowledge has to go beyond demographics to understanding the way your audience thinks, what your audience needs, and what they want. Once you know your audience, you can tailor your content to the things they care about and deliver it when and where they want it.

Start by collecting information on psychographic factors (values, opinions, interests), behavioral factors (past purchases, habits), and environmental factors (friends, family, neighborhood, community). One way to collect this information is to create a survey incorporating these factors and build it right into your content delivery platform. You can make this as simple as a single question, as evidenced by this example from Apartment Therapy, which shows up as a small pop-up at the bottom right-hand side on their homepage.

 

Apartment Therapy content marketing transparency

 

Once you know everything there is to know about your audience, use intelligent segmentation to deliver personalized content to the right people. You can start with something simple like geography and then move to behavior-triggered content.

In addition to creating personalized content, you can also curate content on a personalized basis. It’s a smart use of resources you’ve already created. This practice might look like sending an email digest of blog topics that would appeal to a specific segment of your target audience.

A creative way to personalize your content is to devise ways in which your audience can customize content in fun and engaging ways. A classic example of this is when users can create an avatar. However, customizing content can also be as simple as letting your customers choose the topics or types of content they want to subscribe to and the frequency with which they’ll hear from you.

Content marketing transparency and personalization both offer opportunities to build trust and loyalty with your customers. And they can both be put into practice in remarkably simple ways. Whether you’re starting small with some storytelling on your company website or delving deep into segmentation and lifecycle marketing, be sure to test your content, measure the results, and modify your strategies based on what you learn.

Do you have a story you’d be willing to share about your experience with content marketing transparency and/or personalization? Please share it in the comments section below.

Get in touch with Filament today to get help creating relevant, usable content that builds trust and loyalty with your customers.

08 Jul 2016
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5 Ways to Define Your Brand Voice on Social Media

Sticky Post By On July 8, 2016 With 3 Comments

First impressions are important.  More than likely the first place your customer will take a quick scan of your brand is on social media.  What will their first impression be?  How approachable is your brand at first glance?  Social media approachability is a cornerstone of a clearly defined brand voice because it builds trust.

And having a strong and clear brand voice defined throughout each post, on every social media channel, will set the stage for how they view your brand moving forward.  Follow these five steps to ensure your brand is creating an authentic and approachable voice on social media.

1. Create a Brand Persona  

What three words would you use to define your brand voice?  Identify how your brand differs from the current competitive landscape.  Create a personality for your brand—are you helpful, quirky and fun? Figure out who are you speaking to—Millennials or Baby Boomers, single ladies or new moms?  A great social media marketing voice can lead others to do the marketing for you.  

2. Set the Tone

Tone sets the stage for how your customer will choose to interact and engage with your brand.  Tone should be top of mind with each post you compose prior to hitting publish.  Be friendly, be casual, but most importantly be authentic and on brand.

3. Engage in a Two-Way Conversation

Social media approachability is not a hard sell, it’s a two-way conversation.  Think of how you feel when someone compliments what you are wearing.  Now think of how you’d feel if the brand you’re wearing complimented the photo you posted on Instagram.  It’s important to engage with your customers everyday.  Answer questions, reply to a comment they posted, actively engaging with your audience is key to creating a loyal and devoted customer.

4. Be Authentic, Familiar and Consistent (but not boring!)

Defining your brand voice and establishing social media approachability is part of the long game.  It takes time and consistency to align each post on every channel in your brand voice and tone.  It’s important to be not only consistent with how you engage with your customer each day but also accessible, easy to talk to and authentic.  It’s always a great idea to have a scripted answer to a frequently asked question but also remember you are human and you are speaking to a human. No one likes to interact with a robot.

5. Make Your Brand More Personal

Choose to connect with your customer every day in a more personal and real way.  It’s easy is to copy and paste a standard answer, what’s harder is to go out of your way to solve an issue, respond to a question or right a wrong.  Every customer interaction on social media should be building brand affinity and loyalty.  

 

By creating an accessible, easy to talk to and clearly defined brand voice on social media you are laying the groundwork for establishing a loyal and engaged audience of customers.  The biggest investment in this strategy is time.  The ROI might not be measurable but the longevity and positive sentiments your customer will take away is priceless.

Use these 5 tips to engage with your audience in an authentic and personable way every day.  Looking to define your brand voice on social media? Contact us to get started.

05 Jul 2016
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Transparent SEO

Sticky Post By On July 5, 2016 With No Comments

When hiring an SEO agency to help you optimize your website you’ll want to look for transparent SEO practices and results. But what does that mean?

 

What is SEO?

Let’s define SEO first of all, it stands for Search Engine Optimization and it’s a way to make a website more appealing to search engines (basically Google). A well optimized website should be easily found by your target audience. Basic optimization will get your webpage up and running and noticed by Google. Well-written content with professional writers who specialize in SEO content, like Filament, is a must so your content can remain on your site (as long as it’s relevant) and drive site visits. But sometimes websites feel they need a bit more.

 

What does an SEO Agency do for me?                                

An agency that specializes in search engine optimization will go further and continually track your website and the results for your selected keywords. They’ll watch the statistics and analytics and adjust and adapt throughout time to give you a dynamic website that responds to your changing audience, their needs and wants and even seasonal promotions.

 

What sort of SEO transparency should I look for?

Unfortunately there are SEO agencies out there who really aren’t SEO agencies, they’re just looking to scam websites out of money by offering promises they can’t deliver on. This is where transparent SEO can come in handy and is actually vital. A good agency will be looking at the analytics regularly and either adapting for you or suggesting you make changes to respond to the results. You should be able to request the analytics at any time to see for yourself how your keywords are doing, what pages are most popular, where your visitors are coming from and which efforts are failing or winning. The agency should also be able to explain to you, in terms you understand, what they are doing and what they are going to do to help your website stay optimized. Too many illegitimate agencies try to confuse their marks with jargon and data that’s difficult for the layperson to understand. Watch out for these practices.

 

What to look for in an SEO Agency.

When auditioning SEO agencies, you want to find one who is willing to involve you in the process and educate you along the way. You should never be made to feel stupid or left out. There should be regular reports or analytics provided so you can see the math behind the madness. Your results should be tracked in some way so you can see how they’re doing and how you’re doing. And you never want to go with a company that makes the promise or guarantee of getting you to #1 on Google. There is just no way to guarantee that, if there was everyone would be doing it.

 

Transparent SEO helps both the agency and the website stay on top of the market and constantly evolve the website in question. It’s not a mystery and should never be shrouded in secrecy or confusion.

 

29 Jun 2016
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Keys to Video Email Marketing Success

Sticky Post By On June 29, 2016 With No Comments

Whether you’re new to video in email or you’ve been incorporating video content into your email for some time, it can be helpful to learn new ways to kick your video email marketing efforts up a notch.

Got Goals?

First of all, know what you want to accomplish by adding video to your emails. What does video email marketing success look like to you? Are you trying to boost engagement? Expand your reach beyond email? Increase click-throughs? Generate more conversions? Whatever it is, document your goals for your video email marketing efforts and determine how you’ll measure whether or not you’ve met with success.

Audience Is Everything

Second, keep your target audience in mind. Do they want instructional videos? Humorous videos that show your human side? Are they looking for content about what your brand stands for? Will they watch longer videos that explain how to use your products or do they want 6-second Vine videos? Or do they really respond to GIFs? Use the data you have to make your decisions. Then, track your progress as you go to see what types of video content resonates best.

Lights, Camera…

When you’re shooting and editing your video, use the best recording equipment you can afford. If it’s in your budget, look for a decent DSLR camera that shoots video. A lot of pocket cameras also shoot video, or you can check out the latest camcorders. If that’s not in your budget, you can use an iPhone with a stabilizer or a tripod and still produce excellent video. Just be sure to light your video and get a microphone close to your subject. You can also try any one of a number of video recording apps, such as FilmicPro. However you shoot, be sure to edit on your computer with editing software, such as iMovie, Final Cut Pro or Corel VideoStudio Pro.

Not sure what to shoot, here’s a brief list of potential video content ideas:

  • Behind-the-scenes clips
  • About Us video — a great opportunity to tell your story
  • Video news release
  • Video testimonials
  • Tutorials
  • Thank-you videos

Action

When you’re creating your video, make sure you have a call to action that states what you want subscribers to do after viewing your email. You want to inspire your subscribers to take the next step toward conversion, whether that’s sharing your video on social media or making a purchase. Whatever it is you’d like them to do, make it 1) clear and 2) as easy as possible.

Make It Mobile

Last but not least, make sure your video is mobile optimized, especially if the majority of your emails are opened on mobile devices. Keep the Apple Watch in mind and be sure to optimize the plain text version of your video emails.

Adding Your Video

Video email marketing success is about more than just creating relevant video. How you incorporate it into your email matters, too. You have several ways to incorporate video into your email: embed your video in the email itself, with a GIF, or with a static image that links out to a video location. Let’s briefly delve into the advantages and disadvantages of each option.

Embedded Video

With embedded video, the video plays right in the email, and your subscribers never have to leave their inbox. That’s a plus; however, depending on the email clients your subscriber use, they may not be able to play the video. You’ll want to look at which email clients are predominantly used by your email list, and compare that to the email clients that are compatible with HTML5, the technology that makes it possible to view video in email. Here’s a list of those clients:

  • iOS
  • com
  • Apple Mail
  • Thunderbird 13

Here’s a list of email clients that don’t yet support video:

  • Gmail
  • Yahoo
  • Outlook

For these clients that don’t support video, the subscribers will see a static fallback image. If most of your subscribers use Gmail and Yahoo, you may want to rethink using embedded video.

GIFs

GIFs are the happy medium between embedded video and a static image that links to a video online. While GIFs also link out to a video in a web location, they have the added bonus of incorporating some of the advantages of video: people love them, they grab attention, and they’re great for storytelling. Plus, it’s easy to turn a video into a GIF using tools like MakeaGIF and Giphy. And GIFs are supported by most email clients, with the exception of Outlook 2007–2013 and Windows Phone 7.

Static Image

Your third and final option is to use a static image that links out to a video location online. It’s the safe bet since most email clients support images. Linking out can help drive traffic to your site, if your video is hosted there, or to sites like YouTube or Vimeo, which offer great sharing opportunities. Plus, you can easily just use a screenshot of the YouTube video player, which most people will recognize.

If you opt for option 2 or 3, be sure your video is optimized for search engines. Check out our recent blog post on how to optimize for higher video SEO rankings for more details.

More For Your Money

Videos are a great way to increase email engagement and even expand your reach beyond email. They let you inform and engage your subscribers. And they’re sure to stand out in their inbox. Whether your announcing new products or building brand awareness, video content can be a powerful tool for getting your message across quickly and in a way your audience will enjoy.

If you’ve already used video in your email campaigns, share your tips and trick for video email marketing success in the comments section below. If you haven’t and you’re still feeling wary about where to start, Filament can help. Get in touch with us today.

27 Jun 2016
Sticky Post By Posted in CONTENT MARKETING With 1 Comment Permalink

Video Marketing How-Tos

Sticky Post By On June 27, 2016 With 1 Comment

Video marketing is an essential part of your marketing mix. And there are many types of video to choose from, including explainer videos that introduce your brand or demonstrate complex products, landing page videos, educational videos, email GIFs and About Us videos. No matter what type of video you choose, these are the steps you’ll want to apply to keep your video content marketing strategy on point.

1. Set goals.

What are you trying to accomplish with your video marketing? Brand awareness? Lead generation? Whatever your goals may be, identify and document them for use as a measuring stick for success. You might have different goals for different videos. In addition to identifying you goals, be sure to include how you’ll track success, whether it’s number of views, shares, or conversions.

2. Consider your audience.

Know the audience you’re trying to reach and make sure your video is relevant to them.

3. Clear call to action.

Make it crystal clear what you want your viewers to do after they watch your video. Track how long people tend to watch your video, and make sure your call to action is available both visually and audibly in the most-viewed portion of your content.

4. Be creative.

From crafting content to creating strategy, always employ creativity.

5. Stay on-brand.

Make sure your video content aligns with your brand values and identity. Maintain the brand strategy you’ve set for your website, email marketing and every other channel where you have a presence.

6. Build for mobile.

Almost half of all video content is viewed on mobile devices, and those videos are more likely to be watched all the way to the end. Capitalize on this trend by ensuring your videos are viewable on small screens. Create companion experiences built especially for smartphones to accompany content for TV or other channels.

7. Create supporting materials.

Consumers often seek out additional information after viewing videos. Have that additional information ready to go, in the form of supporting assets like white papers and case studies, and make it easy to find on your website.

8. Host it on your site & YouTube.

You can either post video content to YouTube or host it on your site. Posting to YouTube not only offers greater reach, but also a greater chance that viewers will get distracted by cat videos before they follow your call to action. If your video is hosted on your site, you decrease the chances of distraction while decreasing your reach. Either approach will improve your search engine rankings. Your best bet is to use a mix of both approaches and on occasion use them simultaneously by posting the same video to both, albeit with slight variations.

9. Optimize your video description.

Video offers many SEO benefits. You can optimize video content for search engines by writing clear and concise video descriptions that include CTAs, keywords and, if hosted on YouTube, links back to your site and supporting materials.

10. Distribute via social media.

Make it easy for your audience to find and share your video content by promoting it widely on social media.

11. Track & refine.

Once you’ve created that must-see video and sent it out in the world with social media, be sure to track engagement to get more information about what your target audience wants to see. This step also loops back to step 1 and your goals, letting you analyze how effective your video content is and identify what changes need to be made.

Have you included video in your content marketing strategy? Share your dos and don’ts in the comments section below.

Get in touch with Filament to find out how we can help you expand your reach online and build lasting relationships with your target audience.

24 Jun 2016
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Social Media Video: Do’s and Don’ts

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The impact of video on social media is growing at a rapid pace and is now an undeniable key component in creating a successful social media strategy for your business. How will your brand stand out from the crowd? Utilize these fundamental video best practices to lead the charge with video on social.

Do: Define Your Strategy

Decide how your brand will best be represented in video. Strategize how to use video to not only engage with your audience but also to provide accessible, useful and fun information for them to consume and share.

Lowe’s has set the standard for video best practices by creating helpful and humorous six-second how-to’s on Vine. Featuring useful tips, tricks and DIY ideas submitted by employees and customers, Lowe’s has made their products easy and accessible to their audience. Lowe’s has capitalized on their Vine success by consistently creating more short, simple and impactful videos across all of their social channels while still aligning with their overall marketing strategy. 

Want to give customers a peek behind the curtain to see the inner workings of your business?  Everlane has had early success on Snapchat with extending its supply chain transparency message to the social platform. With “Transparency Tuesdays” Everlane’s social media team answers customer questions and give fans a behind-the-scenes look at a day in the fast growing company.

Customer service is key. Warby Parker uses their YouTube channel to not only educate but also answer their customer’s most commonly asked questions.

Opportunities are endless with video on social but in the end all that matters is that your message is clear and consistent across all channels with a well defined strategy in place.

Don’t: Spend A Lot Of Money

High-quality, professional video can easily be created and edited with any smartphone. Identify what matters to your audience. Production value or authenticity? A series of short impactful videos that highlights your product in the best way possible is money well spent but shouldn’t break the bank.

Do: Keep It Short

Think where you watch videos the most. In line at Starbucks? On the bus during your morning commute? People are viewing social videos while on the go. Keeping it short keeps it buzz-worthy and impactful. Captivate your customer within the first 30 seconds of a pre-recorded video to entice them to watch, engage and ultimately share.  

Create urgency to watch NOW with live video. Host a mini Q&A on Facebook Live or Snapchat a behind-the-scenes look at your latest photoshoot. Your customers are curious. Dazzle them with bite-sized snippets of never before seen aspects of your business.

Don’t: Forget Who Your Audience Is

When creating social video content always keep in mind who you are speaking to. What’s in it for them? Don’t push your product but instead engage your audience to keep them interested, invested and wanting more.

Do: Distribute Everywhere

It’s a video best practice to optimize for each channel but be sure to also distribute across all of the social networks where you are active to be both consistent and effective. Upload to YouTube AND Facebook. Over a minute? Edit down to post on Instagram. Brainstorm ways to translate the essence of the video to Snapchat. In order to create impactful results your audience must see a cohesive message across all social platforms.

Don’t: Forget to Create Measurable Goals

Identify measurable KPI’s before pushing publish on your first post. Define what creates success for your business—engagement, views, impressions or shares. By creating goals you are able to track the success of your social video strategy to inform future content creation.

Use these video best practices to engage with your audience on social media in an authentic and meaningful way every day. Need help implementing these “Do’s” to create a plan for success? We’d love to show you how.

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