What are ways to leverage video advertisements

 

“Videos manage to create three times more customer engagement than written content.”

Maybe you are reading this phrase for the 50th time in the last few months and have been completely overwhelmed by it.

But it’s the truth!

Videos seem to have weaved some magical spell among today’s online audience. As always, every other person is jumping into this trend wagon and, as always, only a few are able to make the most out of it.

Videos are not your regular TV ads.

They mandatorily require an “Inherent Engagement Factor” throughout their duration, or they are immediately rejected.

So how do you create and maintain this engagement factor?

Let’s find out.

Relevance

You are watching an interesting Instagram video and after a minute…

That dreaded message shows up on your screen, “Video ad starting soon.”

In my opinion, promoting your video ads between other videos is the most ineffective way one can promote his content. Majority of times, the viewer is so engrossed in the actual video he is watching that he barely pays any attention to yours.

Sometimes, he gets so frustrated that he quits watching the original video, the moment he gets notified that your ad is going to play.

So what’s the solution?

Also Read: Here are 3 types of kick-ass marketing videos you can create for your service or product

Well, for a start, you should drop the idea of promoting your content in between videos and focus on video ads that play, before a particular video begins.

Secondly, lay significant emphasis on the various platforms that you are promoting your content on, and ensure that there is a robust connection in terms of relevance, between the content you are promoting and the platform you are promoting it on.

Now let’s talk about the trump card –

 Something that can create strong customer engagement, and remove any form of disinterest that customers generally have with video ads:

These are “one-liners at the beginning of the video that focuses on providing immediate value to the customer”.

 If your introductory one-liner manages to woo your customer, then there is a high chance that he might go through the entirety of your video, to know more about your product or service.

Keeping viewers hooked

 As mentioned succinctly, in the previous part, hopefully, it has become apparent to you that the “instant wow factor” is crucial for creating engagement through video ads.

So what are some foolproof measures you can undertake to maintain this wow factor throughout the length of your video?

Featuring known personalities or a testimonial from them is something that always works.

However, random celebrities are a big no and can immediately raise eyebrows regarding the credibility of your content.

What works is if you can rope in online marketers like Neil Patel or Gary Vee in your next video regarding social media lead generation.

But, hiring such influencers is not a child’s play.

You need to produce some exclusive content and should have modest brand equity in the market, before even thinking of soliciting these guys.

How about something that is relatively more feasible for small and medium-sized businesses as well?

Have you ever thought of telling a story through your videos, and make your viewers part of that storyline?

Also Read: Video publisher platform iVideoSmart raises Series A+ funding

A story that has a hero, who faces a lot of hardships at first, but after following the guidelines given out by your video, is able to achieve his goal.

Let’s say…

Mike is a small online business owner who is not able to create sufficient lead generation to support his business.

He is facing stiff competition from his competitors who are much better off and established than him and can hire professional agencies to reach their lead generation goals.

One day he stumbles upon a retired ace marketer, who decides to help him with his lead generation.

The marketer tells him about certain sure-shot strategies that can help him generate quality leads.

Mike diligently follows the tips and is slowly able to increase his lead generation numbers.

Finally, after five years, he is a successful online entrepreneur.

The contribution a storyline brings to your Video marketing game is that a customer gets hooked to your story and its characters and watches the video in entirety to know about the outcome.

Leveraging the power of experiential marketing

 What else can effectively appeal your customer other than making them visually experience, how is it to use your product in real life?

Heard about surprise customer trials?

Yes, these should be your go-to thing while incorporating experience marketing in your video ads.

Check out how virgin airlines nailed their Surprise Customer Trial.

The USP of surprise trials is that they can capture, completely raw and natural reactions from your target audience.

 Something that has the ability to immediately excite your customer, who is watching it in a video, and encourage him to have a similar sort of experience.

So what’s the best way to include such surprise trials in your video ads?

Also Read: How do I create a memorable promotional brand or product video?

You can always create small video snippets of the actual surprise trial video that you have recorded and add these snippets in your video ads.

Adding a good introductory line before playing the snippet would always be a bonus.

A video editing software might come in quite handy in this scenario.

Emotions always work

 Are you explicitly communicating the value offerings of your product/service through your video ads?

That’s great, but so is your competitor.

So how can you create the much-needed exclusivity in your videos?

Associating the implicit benefit attached to your product, in your videos is an effective way to do this.

Your video should help the customer realize what he/she is missing out by not consuming your product/service.

For example

A video ad for an on-demand house cleaning app may portray a notion that

By booking their services a customer is gifted with the much needed free time to binge-watch his favourite TV show, during the weekend, as he doesn’t have to bear the responsibility of cleaning his house anymore.

In this manner, the customer is highly likely to develop an emotional connection with the added benefit that your product is offering.

Wrapping up…

 Before you start following these guidelines, there’s one crucial thing that you should do first.

Try to know your target customer in and out; their likes dislikes preferences, expectations, beliefs, etc.

It’s only then that you can do perfect justice to these guidelines and create highly engaging videos.

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KPIs that Chief Marketing Officers should be concerned about and how to calculate it.

B2B businesses have the longest sales cycle and a wrong move can negatively impact the overall conversion ratio of your business. 

Around 58 per cent of B2B buyers said the decision process is longer in 2017 than it was in 2016. It is continuously growing with every passing year. 

This is the reason, data-driven B2B marketers always rely on clear KPIs to power up their marketing campaigns.

Startup founders who do not take their marketing KPIs seriously find themselves in a tricky situation later on.

Some of the key B2B metrics that every startup should track are discussed below:

1. Monthly recurring revenue (MRR)

MRR stands for Monthly Recurring Revenue. This is the amount that enters the account each month as subscription charges.

Suppose ABC company acquires 10 new customers who have subscribed to individual packages worth $99 each month. The total MRR for the month would be $99×10 =$990.

Now, after a month, the company again acquires 7 new customers who have subscribed to individual packages worth US$99 each. The existing MRR would be $990 while the new MRR would be US$99×7 = US$693.

Hence, the total MRR would be 990 + 693= USD$1683. 

2. Customer lifetime revenue (CLR)

Also Read: A day in the life of StashAways CEO and co-founder

This is a key metric that measures the revenue you receive from your repeat customers within a specified period of time. For a subscription-based business model, this period can be assumed to be of 14 months. New customers stay with the business for around 14 months before they quit. 

Identifying CLR values can help you determine the optimal cost of CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost). Suppose if your CLR is USD$250 and the CAC is USD$275 then you are at a loss. CLR should always be higher than CAC. 

Klipfolio is a great tool that lets you measure the CLR or the CLV (Customer Lifetime Value) accurately and displays it on the dashboard.

 

3. Website traffic

The total number of traffic the website receives is a great metric to track because it tells you about the effectiveness of your digital marketing efforts.

You can use the free Google Analytics tool to track the number of visits to your site.

Moreover, you can sort the visits on the basis of desktop, mobile or on the basis of the top channels that are sending traffic to your site.

Also Read: A consolidation of digital marketing tricks for startups

4- Landing Page Conversion Rate

In order to optimize your entire website for conversions, it is important to track the pages that are converting the maximum visitors.

The average landing page conversion rate is a little more than 30 per cent.

Hence, you need to keep the landing pages conversion higher than the industry average. Analytics software like Finteza is essential to identify which campaigns are performing well and leading to sales.

You can apply filters according to your business goals to get the maximum details about a campaign. 

A lot of people browse through the landing page and exit without doing any transaction and only a few users reach the target stage.

In order to identify the well-performing campaigns, click on the landing page stage under the ad campaign tab. 

You don’t need to configure funnels. Finteza will link all the events with the same prefix into a single conversion funnel and will arrange actions accordingly.

In case you want to change a funnel, just click on the edit mode which can be found at the upper right corner of the corresponding button. 

It is very important for startups to analyze the marketing funnel as it will help them understand at which stage most of the users are finding difficulty. 

KPIs for B2B Advanced Marketing

When you have understood the importance of KPIs and have started evaluating the overall performance of your marketing team then the time is ripe to move on to apply advanced marketing KPIs into your B2B marketing strategy.

Trial conversion rate

The trial conversion rate measures the potential of your trial subscriptions to qualify into actual paid subscribers. 

Trial conversion can let you understand the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and ensure that you offer the right solution to the right people. 

Trial conversion rate can be high or low.

A high value indicates that your trial has the potential to qualify into paying customers while a low value indicates that your software isn’t liked by the people because it isn’t solving the most pressing problems.

Online order frequency

Also Read: Marketing tools and tips to grow your business online

Most B2B businesses focus on improving revenue rather than the flow of online orders. This is where measuring the online order frequency can come handy.

Online order frequency can be tracked using a tool like Google Analytics. The order frequency is directly proportional to the number of qualified prospects visiting your website. 

Conducting surveys about the experience of buying on your site from your existing customers can prove to be extremely beneficial in improving the online order frequency.

Average sales cycle (ASC)

The ASC  is the time taken by the customers to close the deal from the first interaction they had with the brand. 

This should not come as a surprise but most of the B2B marketers do not measure this value and are pretty unaware of the actual time the customer takes to convert.

The sales cycle should be as short as possible. Right after the lead is generated, all the strategies related to lead nurturing should be applied in order to convert the prospect at the earliest. 

InsightSquared is the tool that is pretty useful in tracking your current sales cycle and also provides forecasts to make accurate decisions on time.

Net promoter score (NPS)

The NPS measures customer experience. This score is correlated with revenue growth and is used to identify the loyalty of the customer towards a business. 

A Net Promoter Score divides your customers into 3 types:

• Detractors: They rate your business between 0-6 on a scale of 10 and are the biggest threat to your business. They aren’t satisfied with your product and often complain about your products or services. 

• Passives: They are also known as the uncommitted. They rate you between 7-8 on a scale of 10. They have the maximum chances of leaving your company if they find a good offer from your competitors.

• Promoters: They are your real fans and rate you 9-10 on a scale of 10. They are your real fans and have the potential to make your business go viral.

You can calculate the NPS using the below formula:

• (Number of Promoters — Number of Detractors) / (Number of Respondents) x 100. Suppose you have 100 promoters, 30 detractors and 200 respondents then your NPS would be (100-30)/200X100 = 35. NPS is always represented as an integer and not as a percentage.

Final Thoughts

There are so many KPIs that Chief Marketing Officers should be concerned about. The best ones have been discussed in this article.

Listing down all the KPIs in one centralized place and taking appropriate actions to improve their numbers is one of the best ways to maximize the performance of your B2B marketing strategies. 

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Image Credit:  Corina Rosu

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Creativity, personal branding, and learning from failure

Widely-available, high-quality public schooling is one of the many hallmarks of a successful country. Without public schools, literacy rates would plummet, countries’ gross domestic product would drop, and life would generally be harder for everyone. When each generation is adequately educated, it leads to success for everyone.

One of the subjects that isn’t often taught in public schools is entrepreneurship. Considering that the United States is home to the world’s most active economy and roughly 99.7 percent of all businesses are small businesses, not being taught about entrepreneurship cuts potential students short and makes it more difficult for them to find possible careers they can pursue in the future.

It’s safe to say that entrepreneurship should be taught in schools from a young age. If you need more convincing, here are a handful of lessons about entrepreneurship all school kids should learn that can be applicable later in life.

1. Being creative

Creativity doesn’t just apply to entrepreneurship; it applies to just about everything in life. Creativity is especially important to thriving in an entrepreneurial capacity. A survey of over 100 failed startups conducted by CB Insights found that the most common reason why they failed was that owners simply didn’t provide customers with products they actually wanted to use. If you want to succeed as an entrepreneur, you need to embrace creativity and create something the consumer actually wants.

Telling someone that businesses should create goods and services customers want to buy sounds overly simple, but it’s really not. To work in business, you need to cultivate your creativity.

Also read: Innovation will win, not a trade war

2. Making a brand

Young people struggle to find themselves and accept who they truly are. Schools should help students locate their own “brand”. Focusing on the type of professional persona you want to present to the rest of the world can be helpful to students of any age, especially those beginning to look for colleges and jobs. Understanding how to create a personal brand and market that brand is a skill that can be applied to any business venture.

3. Accepting failure and moving on

Allowing children the chance to fail at a task or project, but avoiding being too harsh on them, shows them that failure sometimes happens and it’s okay. However, it’s also important to help them work toward a new goal and focus on success. Just like in business, it’s important for kids to understand that failure is okay and shouldn’t discourage you from trying again.

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This article was first published on e27, on August 29, 2018.

e27 publishes relevant guest contributions from the community. Share your honest opinions and expert knowledge by submitting your content here.

Photo by Raj Eiamworakul on Unsplash

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A short difference between AI and Machine Learning

 

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are changing the world entirely, but some are confused between the two terms that what they truly are.

Sometimes they used as synonyms while in other cases; they are used as discrete or parallel advancements. But if you want to use these two in an effective and useful manner, you must understand the differences between these.

Differences between AI and Machine

Also Read: 75 per cent of startups fail: ways to increase your chances to be in the 25 per cent

Learning

If you are confused between the two terms such as their meaning, uses and advantages. Below are the key differences between AI and machine learning. 

What is Machine Learning?

It is the branch of artificial intelligence where you study computer algorithms to allow computer programs to improve through the experience automatically.

For example, if you are providing a list of your favourite songs to a machine learning model along with the audio statics like dance, instruments or tempo, etc, it will automate and generate the recommender system to suggest the music in the future you would like to enjoy.

This type of machine learning is known as supervised learning where its algorithms can model relationships and dependencies between the target prediction output and input features so that we could predict the output value of new data through the relationships.

According to Case Study Assignment Help, Another type of machine learning is unsupervised learning which is the family of machine learning algorithms to be used in pattern detection and descriptive modelling.

Also Read: AI, singularity, and machine learning explained in 5 minutes

What is Artificial Intelligence?

Apart from machine learning, artificial intelligence is, on the other hand, is completely wide and different in scope. You can understand with the use of the word “Artificial” which refers to something made by a human, i.e. nonnatural thing while “Intelligence” means the ability to understand and think.

Most of the people believe that artificial intelligence is a system, but that is not correct.

It is not a system; rather AI is implemented in the system. You can take the meaning of AI with other definitions like, it is the study of providing training to computers to make them do things which humans can do better in the present. 

Therefore, we can say that AI is intelligence, where we have the opportunity to add all the capabilities to the machine, are being contained by humans.

AI aims to increase the chances of success instead of accuracy to simulate natural intelligence for solving complex problems, and it works like a computer program for smart working. 

Also Read: What you probably didnt know about machine learning

Conclusion 

Now you know the critical differences in AI and machine learning and to be summarized, we can say that machine learning is all about the experience to look for the pattern it learned while AI uses its experiences for getting knowledge and skills and applying that knowledge for new environments.

Afterwards, many organisations are attempting to separate themselves with the AI to enhance its better use.

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Join our e27 Telegram group here, or our e27 contributor Facebook page here.

Image Credit: Lukas

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Rebranding can be a challenging move, and Sorabel is one of those startups who managed to do it successfully. Find out how

Ever since their first claim to fame in 2018, Indonesian fashion e-commerce platform Sorabel –who was known as Sale Stock Indonesia back then– has made an impression with their rapid growth.

In addition to securing 10 million downloads, this year the company has also begun its international debut by introducing its platform in the Philippines under the brand Yabel.

According to Co-Founder and CEO Jeffrey Yuwono, the international expansion is meant to be an experiment.

“We quickly put it together to see what is going to happen, but the traction has been growing … it gives us the confidence that the kind of product that we put in Indonesia can also work in the Philippines. At some point, we would like to do a proper launch in the country,” he explains.

Sorabel also sets itself apart from other fashion e-commerce companies by introducing a Coba Dulu Baru Bayar (“Try first then pay”) scheme that enables customers to order clothes, have it delivered to their door, and give them a try before they decide on purchasing the clothes.

Also Read: 5 mind-blowing quotes by startup founders at Echelon Asia Summit 2019

Launched nationwide in 2018, the feature is now running in more than 4,300 districts in Indonesia and has been able to improve their basket size –though Yuwono also does not hesitate to admit that return rates are also increasing.

“But I was happy to see that because it means people are using the programme. If the return rate does not change, then I would think of it as a failure,” he says.

In early 2019, the company made headline when it announced a rebrand to Sorabel. Generally, rebranding has been known as a challenging move that even bigger companies such as Mastercard and Pizza Hut had failed miserably at it.

But following the rebrand, Sorabel was able to increase new customer purchase by four times.

So what is the company’s secret sauce to a successful rebrand? Yuwono sits down with e27 to spill them out.

Also Read: Why timing is everything

Quality first

Before we can talk about Sorabel’s rebrand, first of all, we need to understand how the company operated and the challenge it faced.

When it first began, what Sorabel did was to buy and sell clothing products from Tanah Abang, a leading textile market in Central Jakarta. But the startup soon learned that their customers did not come back. While the price of the products was affordable, the quality was far from expectation.

“One thing to understand about our local fashion industry is that 95 per cent of all the fashion made in Indonesia, is made in very small factories or convection … The problem with these home industries is that the margin is very thin and there is no quality control,” Yuwono elaborates.

“It’s not a big deal when you buy offline because you can touch and feel the product, but online … It’d be like gambling,” the CEO stresses.

Understanding the problem, Sorabel then decided to build their own private label, which enables them to play a more active role in quality control.

Also Read: [Exclusive] Raising a new funding round, The Shonet aims to push for greater growth

“One of the reasons why we rebranded from Sale Stock to Sorabel because we are not just about the low price; we are also about the most up-to-date fashion, good quality, trustworthy services,” Yuwono says.

A familiar new face

 

Now here comes the part about the rebrand.

Following the launch of its new identity, Sorabel hired a brand research agency to measure the public’s perception of the brand. They discovered that within just three months, the brand Sorabel has replaced Sale Stock in every brand perception metric that the company tracked.

“We created the brand in just two months, which is crazy because a lot of brand agencies said that we need at least six months,” Yuwono points out.

The CEO concludes that they were able to get to that point because they understand their customer well –and they did intend to create a brand that connects well to the customers.

Also Read: Grab joins China’s ZhongAn Insurance to build digital insurance marketplace

“During the Sale Stock days, we had a customer service mascot called Soraya … I have talked to random people about online shopping and I asked our customers, have you ever shopped at Sale Stock before? And they would be, ‘Sale Stock? You mean Soraya?’” Yuwono says.

“Then for the rest of the conversation, they would refer to us as Soraya. They have an emotional connection with Soraya and not Sale Stock. Sale Stock as a brand is cold and functional, but what they remember was the warmth, chit-chat, banter with our customer service,” he continues.

The next move

 

Their successful rebrand has opened up plenty of exciting opportunities, including a foray into the offline. The startup is looking forward to expanding their offline footprint by opening a retail store.

“Now that we actually have a brand that stands for fashion, we are ready to try offline. So I am hoping to open one as soon as possible,” Yuwono says.

Sorabel is also on the process of fundraising, and the funds will be used to support their international and offline expansion.

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Image Credit: Sorabel

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