by Fronetics | Jun 1, 2016 | Blog, Content Marketing, Marketing, Social Media
Improve the reach of your videos with these distribution strategies.
This is part three of a three-part series of creating videos for YouTube for businesses. Check out part one, YouTube for Business 101, and part two, Cheap and Easy Tools for Creating YouTube Videos.
If you have put the resources into creating videos for your business, you absolutely want as many people to view them as possible. Hosting them on your YouTube channel is an excellent start. But you can do more to ensure your videos attain their maximum reach.
Here are seven ways to share video content from your YouTube page.
1) Optimize your YouTube channel.
After you have uploaded a video to your YouTube channel, make sure your viewers can easily find and watch it. There are a few ways to do this.
Add it to a playlist.
Consider YouTube playlists like chapters of a book. They help your audience understand what your channel is about and navigate to the content that interests them. Playlists also represent a marketing and branding opportunity for you. For example, Southwest Airlines’ Fee Hacker Tips playlist includes humorous, 15-second clips on how to save money when flying other airlines. Or the Late Late Show with James Corden has a dedicated playlist for its popular Carpool Karaoke segment.
Here’s how to create a playlist. Once you’re done, make sure to add a description of the playlist to give your viewers an idea what it is about.
Use it as the channel trailer.
You can choose to have a video trailer play when a user visits your channel. Much like a movie trailer, this video will give visitors an idea of what your channel — and, thus, your business — is about and will entice them to subscribe. Lonely Planet, for example, uses their beautiful Best Places to Travel in 2016 video as an introduction to their content.
Here’s how to set your video as the channel trailer. You can also choose to have the channel trailer play only when an unsubscribed user visits your page.
Create channel sections.
Channel sections are like building blocks: They allow you to custom build your channel’s layout. You can create a section of particular videos, the most recently uploaded videos, a playlist (or playlists), and more, and then reorder the sections to best highlight the content you want to promote. Your channel can have up to 10 sections.
Here’s how to organize content using channel sections.
2) Embed in your blog posts.
Once your video is on YouTube, it is super easy to share and embed in places like your blog posts. That means the reader won’t have to navigate to YouTube from your post to watch the video: It will play right in your post. To get the embed link, click on the video you would like to use. At the bottom of the video, click “Share,” and then “Embed.” You can choose the player size, as well as other things like what plays after the video is done. YouTube will generate a customized embed code based on your preferences, which you can add to your blog post.
3) Post it to your Facebook timeline.
The number of videos uploaded to Facebook increased by 94% from 2014 to 2015, with more than 50% of Americans who use Facebook daily viewing at least one video per day. What’s more, 76% of people in the US who use Facebook say they tend to discover the videos they watch on Facebook. This makes having video content on your page almost a must-do.
You can post your YouTube video to your Facebook timeline by clicking the share button and choosing the Facebook icon under the video on your channel. Note that you can also upload a video directly to Facebook by clicking “Add photos/videos” at the top of your newsfeed. There are pluses and minuses to both approaches. Viewer activity on your video embedded from YouTube is included in your YouTube analytics. Uploading directly to Facebook means you will have to analyze your YouTube metrics as well as your Facebook video metrics to get an idea of how your video is performing overall. On the other hand, native Facebook videos have twice as much organic reach as YouTube embeds.
4) Add a call-to-action button on your Facebook page.
Drive viewers of your Facebook page directly to your video by creating a call-to-action button on your cover photo. To add, go to your page’s cover photo and click “Create Call to Action.” (Note: not everyone has this feature yet.) There are several options, including “Watch Video.” Action camera manufacturer GoPro makes use of this button, which leads to its YouTube channel feed on the GroPro site.
5) Use a Twitter Payer Card
Don’t just tweet about your video — actually tweet it! Twitter Cards allow you to attach photos, videos, and media experience to tweets that drive traffic to your website. Ensure your the actual video populates in your followers’ Twitter feed (instead of just a link to the video) with a Player Card. Here’s an example of what it looks like:
6) Give a sneak peek on Vine or Instagram.
Users can share short video clips on Vine (6 seconds) and Instagram (60 seconds). Though the videos you produce for YouTube will likely be longer, you can offer a sneak peek of the more robust content through these social platforms. You’ll reach a wider audience, and probably a younger demographic as well.This is important, keeping in mind that the B2B buyer profile is getting younger, too.
7) Pin it.
Pinterest is another social platform many B2B companies have yet to tackle. But with 100 million active users, there is a lot of untapped potential there. “People are planning out really core and important parts of their lives on Pinterest,” says Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann. That includes career and professional endeavors.
You can embed YouTube videos directly onto Pinterest. Just click the “Share” button under the video on your channel.
Another thing to consider: Pinterest boards rank in Google searches. Create some boards around keywords you would like to rank for, post relevant content (like videos) that you’ve created, and watch SEO and the reach of your content improve.
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by Fronetics | May 31, 2016 | Blog, Content Marketing, Marketing
Overcome writer’s block with these ideas for blog posts.
It’s time to write that new blog post, and your computer screen is a vast, white page of emptiness. Maybe it feels as if you have covered all of obvious topics of interest and you have nothing left to write about. You need direction. You need motivation (or coffee). You need fresh ideas, a new angle or approach, or a modern-day muse!
You are not alone. Topic development is a skill, and some days it is a challenge — especially because you want your content to be unlike any other post out there. And there is a lot of content to compete with: Reportedly, 88% of B2B marketers use content marketing as part of their programs.
So, your post needs to stand out above the crowd, engage readers quickly, and offer them something valuable (e.g., information or entertainment) to keep them coming back to you for more. With that in mind, here are 10 prompts to get you going on your next blog post.
10 writing prompts for blog posts
1) Identify customer pain points.
Think about your target audience. Who is that potential customer? What are some of their everyday pains or challenges? Provide them with insight or information, offer advice, or provide solutions for overcoming those problems.
2) Use your industry experience.
Create a comprehensive list of industry-related statistics or facts. Then, focus on one that you can speak to. Such posts position you as a thought leader on industry challenges and trends. They also are great for getting inbound links (meaning other sites will link to your post, which improves your SEO).
3) Capitalize on popular trends.
What is hot in your business right now? What is important and trending in your potential customer’s corner of the world? Speak to others in your company for their ideas. Is this trend going to last? If it is on its way out, what is your prediction about what the next big trend may be?
4) Provide information.
Write a how-to guide. Help your readers make a decision or accomplish a task. Show your knowledge about the subject to establish yourself as a trusted source of information.
5) Offer a different opinion or new perspective.
Read other blogs in your industry for fresh ideas. This is simply a leaping-off point — plan to cover the topics in a different way.
6) Join in on top-level industry conversations.
Follow industry leaders on Twitter and LinkedIn. Join social media groups related to your business, and read what others in your specific industry are sharing. What are they posting about today? How can you expand on it or argue a different opinion or solution?
7) Localize a new story.
Read trade publications, magazines, and even the news for ideas. How can a hot topic relate to your business or customers? Look for hidden connections. In the newspaper business they call it “localizing” a story — essentially taking a story that, on the surface, is not related and finding a way to discuss it in terms of localized relevance.
8) Share your “musts.”
Write a top 10 list of industry must-knows, or perhaps must-dos, or even must-reads. Be a key source for even more information and knowledge.
9) Introduce your latest release.
Write about your latest project, product, or service and how it will solve specific challenges or address certain needs.
10) Answer customer questions.
Read and digest all of your readers’ responses, posts, or questions. Sometimes the customer generates great blog ideas through a conversation or a question. Write your post as a generalized response to others who may have the same concern, idea, or question.
Content marketing helps connect potential customers to your company by offering information they can use. But creating consistent, relevant content can be time-consuming and costly. If you frequently find yourself staring at a blank screen, consider outsourcing this important task to professionals. Many companies find it provides the optimum results, saving time and resources.
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by Fronetics | May 24, 2016 | Blog, Content Marketing, Marketing, Strategy
Outsourcing content marketing can cost a fraction of what dedicating in-house resources would — and you’ll get better results.
Nobody can do it all, despite what the latest motivational meme tells you. When running your business, it is vital that you focus on where you excel; sticking with your core competency is critical. Essentially, the more hats you wear in your company, the more watered down your efforts become.
Content marketing can be highly effective in generating leads and driving sales, but doing it right requires significant time and effort. If you are trying to manage content on top of overseeing key aspects of your business’ day-to-day operations, you are stretching yourself thin. What’s more, it’s negatively impacting your bottom line.
Why DIY content marketing can be costly
Many companies mistakenly think that managing their content marketing in house is simple, cost effective, and not time consuming. Actually, nothing could be further from the truth. Here is why:
Lost hours on your job
Taking time away from your primary focus prevents you from doing your job. If what you do best is new product development, for example, then dedicating hours each week to writing blog posts means that much less time for market research, design, and implementation. Those few hours away each week add up over time, and the cost to your company is significant.
Lost leads and sales opportunities
You may be a good writer and have personal social media accounts, but do you understand the ins and outs of creating and distributing content in a business setting? Professional content writers have expertise in search engine optimization (SEO), branding, user experience, and storytelling — all of which drive traffic and generate leads. Social media strategists similarly have expert knowledge of networking sites and how to best reach a target audience. If you don’t have that expertise, you are costing your company those opportunities — or, again, taking time away from your primary function trying to learn.
Lost readership and audience retention
If your content does not engage your audience, you shouldn’t have bothered in the first place. And engaging content doesn’t occur by happenstance. Research shows a strong correlation between content marketing success and strategy, documentation, and frequent check-ins. You need to know exactly who your audience is and what they want to read, and then you need a long-term plan for continually reaching them in new and interesting ways. Then you need to regularly assess your strategy and adjust as needed. As you can imagine, that all takes time and focus.
According to Forbes, outsourcing your content marketing is a cost-effective way to increase the success of your program. Essentially, you get expertise and experience — at a fraction of the cost of dedicating in-house resources — with no long-term commitment. By allowing experts to create strategies and leverage well-crafted, engaging content across multiple channels, you can improve lead generation and exponentially increase sales.
The Takeaway
By outsourcing your content marketing to the right firm, you can:
- Get professionally written, optimized content that engages your target customer and builds relationships.
- Benefit from the firm’s experience with content marketing for your industry and beyond.
- See results and ROI. The firm should put metrics on all of your marketing activities and deliver a regular report to you so you can monitor progress.
- Save time and money: You can focus on the core aspects of growing your business, while outsourcing your content marketing costs a fraction of dedicating in-house resources.
Simply put, it ultimately costs less to let experts create and execute your content. Given the reins, they can leverage their experience to produce greater results, capture more leads, analyze results, revise strategies, and, most importantly, free up your schedule to focus on your key responsibilities.
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by Fronetics | May 17, 2016 | Blog, Content Marketing, Marketing, Strategy
Producing engaging content is the number one challenge for content marketers.
Is content marketing working well for your business? If not, you are not alone. Though it is one of the most effective ways to grow your business, content marketing has been challenging B2B and B2C organizations since its inception.
You may think it should be simple: Write, post, get more customers. But content marketing is much more complex, demanding more time, thought, and careful strategy than churning out a few blog posts. First and foremost, what you produce must engage readers. This is, however, the biggest content marketing challenge facing both B2B and B2C marketers.
2016 reports produced by Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs, and sponsored by Brightcove, found that the number one challenge for B2B and B2C marketers is producing engaging content.
Dull content and the domino effect
Unfortunately, if you lack engaging content, it works like a domino, knocking down all your other marketing efforts.
For one, it is much easier to gain the support of the C-suite, and be granted a reasonable budget, for your content marketing plan if you can show that your strategy is attracting more customers, helping with conversions, and driving sales. But if your content is not producing results, you won’t get the support and resources you need to produce the content, which, in turn, fuels results. It is a vicious cycle.
That being said, lack of engaging, quality content may be indicative of other challenges you may be facing, like the resources to produce content.
Creating engaging content
There are a few basics you must address if you are going to produce engaging content:
- Research your customer demographic. You must know who your audience is, what they want to know, how they want to learn it, and where to find them. Use web analytics to learn how your audience interacts with your website, what kinds of posts and emails they are reading, and where improvements can be made.
- Do your due diligence and learn how to reach those potential customers with topical information they want and will read. This means conducting a solid analysis of trends in your industry and producing content that offers expert information on these subjects or answers pressing questions potential customers may have about them. You, thus, will establish your organization as a trusted voice for your industry. This leads to dialogue with prospects and customers that want to learn more from you about industry news — or, even better, who are interested in your products or services.
- Research your distribution channels. This can affect not only what you post, but where and when you post it. Know your target’s social media habits, when they read emails, and what they are looking for. Research your competition and learn which channels they focus their attention on and why. Read the latest industry publications and influential blogs to uncover what topics work to engage their readers. Look for trends and answer to them.
- Look at SEO evaluations and site audits to help identify new middle- and bottom-of-the-funnel opportunities for content.
- Tell a story.
If creating engaging content has proven to be challenging for your business, consider outsourcing your content creation, or your marketing program all together. According to Social Media Today, lack of marketing staff can make it difficult for organizations to produce enough content to keep up with their competition.
Quality research and consistent creation of engaging, relevant content is time-consuming and requires keen writing skills. Promoting your posts on social media also takes time and requires consistent effort. Some of the most successful organizations put this task in the hands of an expert that can create and leverage content to provide the greatest impact to your brand, lead generation, and new customer conversion rate.
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by Fronetics | Apr 7, 2016 | Blog, Leadership, Logistics, Strategy, Supply Chain
As part of our series on trailblazing women in the supply chain industry, I interviewed Barbara Jorgensen, co-founder and managing editor, Electronics Purchasing Strategies (EPS). Jorgensen has more than 20 years’ experience as a journalist, working for leading electronics industry publications such as Electronic Business, Electronic Buyers’ News, and EDN.
As a freelance writer, Barb wrote and managed an award-winning custom publication for Sager Electronics; was a leading contributor to Avnet Global Perspectives magazine; was a regular columnist for the National Electronics Distributors Association monthly newsletter; and wrote for industry associations such as IPC. Barb was also a featured blogger on the B2B Website Allbusiness.com and helped launch Electronics Sourcing North America, a start-up magazine serving purchasing professionals in the Americas.
Prior to her freelance career, Jorgensen was a senior editor at Electronic Business, the pre-eminent management magazine for the electronics industry, featuring world-class manufacturing companies such as Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Cisco and Flextronics International. Before joining EB for the second time, Barb spent six years with Electronic Buyers’ News as managing editor, distribution, winning several awards for coverage of the distribution beat. A graduate of the University of Binghamton, Barb began her journalism career with the Gannett newspaper chain. She has worked for a number of local newspapers in the Greater Boston area and trade journal publishers Reed Business Information and UBM.
How long have you worked in the supply chain industry?
I’d measure my specific supply chain experience with the publication of my first feature on electronics distribution in 1989. After copy editing for a leading electronics industry magazine for a couple of years the editors suggested I use my journalism experience to do some writing. I profiled Marshall Industries, a top-tier distributor at that time, and its founder, Gordon Marshall, who passed away last year.
How did you choose (or end up) working within the industry?
In high school and college, I specialized in journalism and had been writing features and covering town government for a Boston-area daily newspaper. The schedule was grueling, so I applied for work at a trade magazine publisher. This eventually led to being assigned the electronics distribution beat. I made it my goal to understand the business inside and out, and that expertise helped establish my credentials in the industry.
Two of the leading distributors now generate revenue in excess of $20 billion per year; I was calling on them before they reached their first $1 billion.
Although I never expected to become an expert in the electronics supply chain, the growth of the industry and my expertise has enabled a solid career path.
Let’s talk about EPS. How did EPS come about?
Electronics Purchasing Strategies – soon to be called EPSNews – was driven by several external events taking place in trade publishing. A few years prior to EPS, which started publishing online in 2013, the last purchasing publication in the industry closed its doors. Trade publishers were also laying off editors as they moved more content online. My two colleagues and I – Gina Roos and Bolaji Ojo – found ourselves unemployed all at the same time.
Given the under-representation of purchasing in the trade media, we decided to come together and start an online publication. Our reputation in the electronics industry helped us secure our first advertisers. We have been fortunate enough to support the publication primarily through advertising and newsletters since.
Where is EPS today?
While we were assessing our business model after three years we discovered we weren’t keeping pace with some of the dynamics of online publishing. Although our content has always been well received we weren’t getting as much ‘bang for the buck’ as we should have vis-a-vis SEO because of the way we developed our site. Although our content won’t change—we are focused on deep analysis of the entire supply chain from design through recycling – emphasizing the news aspect of our coverage will attract a wider audience and result in better organic growth.
Revenue-wise we have grown every year since our inception; 2015 was our best year so far, growing in the mid-double-digits.
What goals do you have for the company?
We’d like to expand. Our audience has largely been based in the U.S. because that is the market we know best, but clearly electronics procurement in the Far East continues to expand. The electronics markets in Europe remains steady and, let’s face it, the supply chain is global. So EPSNews would like to devote resources toward building an audience in the EU, the Far East, and relevant geographies in between.
Have you seen a change in the number of women entering the industry and/or contributing to the industry?
Absolutely. When I began my writing career in the tech industry there were fewer women in trade publishing – most of the women I networked with then were in marketing and PR. But that changed pretty rapidly at least on the media side during the 1990s. I’d say by then there was a 50-50 split between women and men in key editorial positions. In the electronics industry, however, there were few women executives. The first woman CEO of a major distribution company was Harriet Green, named CEO of Premier Farnell in 2006. Prior to that there were a handful of women in C-level positions – I know if I mention names I will forget someone – which was extremely encouraging. These days I see more women at industry forums such as EDS and at the ECIA conference than ever before, and they are in management positions.
Have you seen a change in the positions women hold within the supply chain industry?
Again, absolutely. Women are holding higher positions in management within my ‘world’—electronics distribution – but even more so within the online/social media companies such as Yahoo that have become so important to all of us. I also recently attended a presentation by a woman who headed the high-tech entrepreneurial business within Foxconn – a Chinese EMS company – who has since moved to Flex.
Any advice for women considering entering the industry?
My advice would be the same for anyone—learn as much as you can upfront. In business journalism, I had to interview CEOs and MBAs and at the beginning that was intimidating. I finally overcame that fear by reading everything I could about the company, the industry and the executive in advance, and I also asked ‘dumb’ questions of people I trusted. I also found that admitting what I didn’t know never hurt me: even the highest executives in the industry were willing to take the time to explain many of the things that make this industry unique. I think in general people are always willing to give someone a ‘hand up.’ I also found that companies like to work with writers that took the time to learn about their business. Knowledge and professionalism are guidelines I’d recommend for anyone.
On a broader level, what trends do you see within the industry?
I think right now there is a lot of turmoil regarding the supply chain as we know it and the implications of conducting business digitally. This applies to how companies work internally and how they are going to market. The supply chain has done a pretty good job at adopting technology to improve internal operations – we haven’t had an inventory glut since 2001. Externally it’s another matter. E-commerce unintentionally set off huge problems in counterfeiting. We are still trying to figure out where social media fits: it looks like ‘free’ advertising – you can generate a lot of attention with a tweet – but you don’t always control your message. Look at the mistakes people make that go viral.
Then there is managing the supply chain online. Business practices within the electronics supply chain haven’t kept up with technology. For example, supplier franchises are still granted on a regional basis – less so than before – but online business doesn’t have any boundaries. I think we are going to see common supply chain practices change as technology accelerates. Geographic boundaries are already crumbling, and there are practices such as ship-from-stock-and-debit; inconsistent global pricing; and demand-creation compensation that are simply inefficient. There’s little room for inefficiency in the digital supply chain.
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