Get Ready for Your Close-Up: 8 Video Marketing Trends to Implement in 2018

Kathleen Ohlson is a writer and editor with over 10 years of experience. Previously, she was a high tech reporter covering various topics, including 9/11 and virus attacks. You can follow Kathleen on Twitter, @kaohlson.

This year you’re very likely going to need to buy (more) video equipment, create (more) scripts, and spend (more) time in the editing room. Video marketing last year became a nice-to-have marketing tool, and now it will be a must-have in 2018.

According to Wyzowl, 63% of businesses are using videos as a marketing tool. Many respondents said video is an important part of their strategy -- and they’re putting resources into it and seeing results. For example, TutorVista, a site that connects students to tutors, saw an 86% increase in conversions through video on its landing page.

Why are companies looking to video marketing more? It connects with our most dominant sense: Vision. Videos can build on that trust you want to grow with your audience, showing how your products and services work and helping to make that connection. Plus, it gets visitors to stay on your sites longer.

And the amount of videos on social media is astounding, according to a report by Website Builder. As of April 2017:

• 48 hours of video are uploaded every minute on YouTube
• On Twitter, videos are retweeted six times more than photo posts
• 100 million hours of video are watched daily on Facebook
• 10 billion videos are watched daily on Snapchat

Whether you might be putting together a video marketing strategy for the first time or are looking to bring it to the next level, here are some trends you might want to incorporate this year.

Live video/streaming

Social media helped boost the transition to live video/streaming last year. Live video increases engagement with your customers, offers you greater exposure and, more importantly, expresses the human side of your brand. Tools from Facebook Live to streaming apps like BeLive and Wirecast are making streaming accessible to your audience through behind-the-scenes video content and live events such as 69th Emmy Awards, which had more than 2 million viewers.

Interactive content

When you start implementing live video/streaming, you want it to be a two-way conversation. Interactive content, such as quizzes and Q&As, enable you to chat with your audience and further strengthen that relationship. They can pop up during a video, encouraging the audience to engage with you. You can tailor this content so you can see how well your audience understands a topic or how interested they are in certain steps in the buyer’s journey.

Personalization

Personalization is always important in marketing, helping to build a passionate audience and increase conversion rates and customer retention. Combining personalization and video marketing will only strengthen that connection. By offering a relevant, thoughtful customer experience for that “one” customer, you build trust. According to Vidyard, personalized videos increase click-to-opens 16 times and total click-throughs 4.5 times. Personalization in videos, for example, can appear in strategic spots and link with stored information, such as names, cities or job titles.

Mobile

Here’s a number that will blow your mind: YouTube reports mobile video consumption rises 100% every year, according to RendrFx. And it’s no surprise that companies are focusing more on the small screen. More people every day are watching videos on the go, so you need to create mobile-ready content that requires a few keystrokes to engage with it.

Square aspect ratios

How you show this video content to your mobile viewers is vital to keeping them around. While mobile screens are getting larger, they’re never going to be the equivalent of laptop screens or  desktop monitors -- and social platforms will automatically crop your videos. Using a square aspect ratio will allow your videos to take up more space on smartphone screens, improving views and engagement levels.

360-degree videos

Another type of live video is 360-degree videos, also known as immersive or spherical videos. A view in every direction is recorded at the same time using either an omnidirectional camera or a bunch of cameras. The cool part? Consumers can control their perspective when they view the videos through a virtual reality headset or with a computer or smartphone’s browser control. Companies, including National Geographic, Hong Kong Airlines and The New York Times are adding this element to their video marketing, making the customer experience more immersive and memorable.

Muted videos

You don’t want to be that person who visits a site where a video starts playing really loudly or inappropriately, so people are becoming more aware of their surroundings and muting or turning down the volume. Google has been working on this issue, rolling out its updated Chrome browser that mutes auto-play videos of any kind. If you’re working on videos, you’ll need to come up with ways to get your message across. You might even need to include subtitles or captions rather than relying on voiceovers.

Digital hangouts

Another offshoot of live videos is digital video group hangouts, offering real-time, real-life shared experiences. Most of these users (so far) are Gen Zers. For example, Houseparty, a teen-centric video chat app, has garnered a total of 20 million users who together have participated in more than a half a billion “parties,” the app’s term for video calls. Houseparty users are mostly under the age of 24 and spend an average of 51 minutes a day on the app. Not to be outdone, Facebook is said to be working on Bonfire, an app to compete with Houseparty.

This year, consumers want to watch videos and be immersed in the experience to the point that they’re part of the show. The pressure’s on to not only have video marketing, but to incorporate some of these new trends quickly and show why it’s worth it to your audience to click on you.

5 Ways to Land Your Next Job Through Social Media

Janet Mesh is a digital marketer and freelancer with expertise in social media marketing, content creation, blogging, and email marketing. When she's not implementing integrated marketing campaigns, you can find her hopping on a plane to a new country or indulging at a new Boston restaurant. Follow her on Twitter or Instagram @meshymind. 

You probably clicked through to this blog post assuming you’ll get some tips & tricks on how to use LinkedIn to your advantage to get a new job or freelancing gig. But I’m here to bring another social media channel out of the shadows and into the spotlight — Twitter.

Yep, you read that right. Twitter.

With the popularity of Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat, everyone inside and outside the world of social media questions whether Twitter can stand up to its powerhouse counterparts. It seems like every year, there’s a new article about why Twitter is dead. The user numbers speak for themselves — in the past year, Facebook reached 2 billion users, Instagram reach 700 million, and Twitter stagnated with 328 million. So based on this data, it’s true that Twitter is not the most popular social media platform.

Source: TechCrunch

However, in a less saturated social environment comes opportunity.

So here I am to proclaim my love for the little blue bird and luckily, I have more than 280 characters to share my story about how I landed two freelance gigs through Twitter -- as well as tips on how to leverage it to land your next job.

1. Follow industry influencers, people, and companies you want to work with

I’ve been freelancing for almost 2 years and found two of my current gigs through Twitter. Thanks to a Boston Content tweet, I landed a gig as a freelance marketing coordinator with Trello in October of this year. I had been following the Boston Content social media accounts, especially on Twitter, for more than a year. They shared a tweet that Trello was hiring this freelance position. I immediately jumped on the opportunity since I love their product and corporate culture (the company supports remote work and it’s my goal to be location independent). So I applied that night, had an interview set up within the week, and was hired by Trello shortly thereafter!

As for my other gig as an account manager for Metter Media, a social media management agency, I was following one of their employees on Twitter and saw that she shared an open contractor position. This was in the spring of 2016. I applied for the position, interviewed with the owners in person, and was offered the role shortly after the interview as well.

Twitter is a great platform for following influencers, people, and companies that you admire or what to work with one day. It’s also more than acceptable to follow a stranger on Twitter. In addition to keeping up-to-date on industry trends, you’ll may see a fateful tweet about an open position. Just make sure your profile is professional and convincing enough to be hired (see #3).

2. Create Twitter lists

Now that you’re following influencers, companies, and anyone else that you’d like to work with, you can stay up-to-date with them by creating Twitter lists. You can add any followers to your Twitter lists and create list themes like I have, such as Social Media News. One of the best aspects of Twitter is TweetDeck. It allows you to create a command center of your Twitter Lists and any users or hashtags you want to keep tabs on. To access your TweetDeck, all you have to do is sign into your Twitter account and go to https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/ in your browser. Once you have your Twitter lists created, you can then organize them in TweetDeck so you never miss a beat or tweet with your favorite followers or industry news.

3. Create a cohesive persona across social profiles

According to Career Builder, a whopping 70 percent of hiring managers use social media to screen candidates before hiring. Of that 70 percent of hiring managers, 54 percent decided not to hire a candidate based on their social media profiles. Yikes.

All's not lost though, friends. A cohesive and authentic persona across your social media profiles can help sway and even convince a hiring manager to set up a initial phone screening call. According to the same Career Builder study, “more than 4 in 10 employers (44 percent) said they found content on a social networking site that caused them to hire the candidate.”

So what does a cohesive online persona consist of? First off, you should have a professional photo (keep those Saturday night selfies to your group texts) and a clear & punchy bio. If you have a website or online portfolio, definitely link to it in your bio. Choose a cover photo that represents your personality or industry expertise. These rules don’t just apply to Twitter. Your personal brand should be consistent on LinkedIn and even on Facebook and Instagram (hiring managers know no bounds when it comes to Googling potential candidates). And of course, keep your social media profile active by sharing interesting tweets and posts, which brings me to my next point...

The Boston Content Executive Directors are marketers who know how to market themselves.

4. Share content that is relevant to the industry you work in

Would you hire someone to manage your company’s social media channels if the candidate hasn’t updated their own profile since 2016? Probably not.

If you’re using your social media profiles to position yourself for a new job, you’ll want to share valuable information about the industry you work in or want to work in. Position yourself as a thought leader by sharing articles and insights from the influencers you follow and put your two cents into the conversation as well.

But it’s not all business, let your personality shine by tweeting about your interests and hobbies, too. Bonus points if you own a dog... everyone loves a cute dog photo.

5. Attend events on & offline

The marketing world can seem saturated and overwhelming. But the more you put yourself out there and meet other marketers, the sooner you’ll realize that it’s actually a small and welcoming community. Boston Content, General Assembly, and The American Marketing Association host monthly marketing events in Boston. I’ve met some amazing people through their events who have helped me define and refine my career path.

However, you don’t have to wait for the in-person events to participate in industry conversations or learn new trends. Twitter Chats occur daily and are an excellent way to connect with other marketers over a specific topic. And this is where TweetDeck becomes a savior: You can create a search of the Twitter Chat hashtag, such as #BufferChat, and it constantly loads tweets making it easy to like, retweet, and respond to other participants instantly.

Best of all — you never know who you may meet online or IRL. They may be the person who helps you find your next career move!

Do you have any other hacks on how to leverage Twitter to develop your marketing career?
I’d love to hear them! Connect with me on Twitter (@meshymind) and feel free to @ me with comments or questions.

How the Design of Your B2B Email Newsletter Can Increase Click Rates

Adam Rogers is the Content Marketing Manager at Kayako, the help desk software to grow personal customer relationships. Adam loves creating long-form content, check out his latest guide on customer service training.

Everyone loves B2B email newsletters, right?

Wrong. Emails can be headaches for both the marketing teams who create them, and the customers who receive them. Many marketing emails suffer from poor design and low click rates. Even with the best efforts, click rates can remain stubbornly low.

But email marketing remains one of the best (if not the best) digital marketing channels for return on investment. According to a study by Econsultancy, 22% of companies rated email as having an excellent return on investment, and it beat even SEO and content marketing for ROI.

So why are your campaigns not performing as well as they could? The average click rate on B2B emails is 5.27%, versus an open rate of 23.84%. These are disappointing results for most marketers, but there is a simple option to improve your click rates.

You may have thought it was your snazzy copy or amazing deals that engaged your audience, but you’d be wrong. We’ll tell you why.

Changing your newsletter design will most likely increase the click rates of your campaigns. Read on to find out what supermarket jam can tell us about the design of your marketing emails.

Kayako’s email newsletter design

At Kayako, we’ve been building an inbound funnel since 2015. At the end of the year, I’m able to use the down time to look into our analytics thoroughly. Last year I discovered that there was room for improvement in our click rates. They weren’t where we wanted them to be.

Email marketing is extremely valuable for engaging and converting your customers, but many companies aren’t doing it in the right way. Brands are especially prone to sending their subscribers emails that aren’t relevant, don’t get clicked, and end up in the trash can.

There’s a typical format that most brands use in their email newsletters. It goes something like this:

• Featured article or announcement as a header
• A line or two of copy promoting the content
• A link to a webinar, a course, new product features, etc
• Two supporting articles

But this wasn’t working for us.

This is partly because of the templates available in popular email marketing software. But another issue was not empathizing with our audience too well.

For Kayako, we send a weekly email to busy customer support folks. Support departments are often underinvested and their inboxes are packed with requests for help. For our newsletter, we can’t send them a big lengthy read with a ton of links to check out. Instead, we switched to offer up the best of our blog that week with a short lede and call to action to read the post.

Now we want to ask you to let your creativity free, and approach email design with minimalist flair.

Below is what the overhaul of the Kayako newsletter looked like. We went from a bi-monthly plain text email with three links to the blog, to a much more visually appealing weekly one-shot format.

The new design directed our subscribers to the one article we thought would interest them most that week.

When we changed our email campaign design like this, the results amazed us.

Click rates doubled in our December newsletter. Or to put a value on it, an increase in click rates at 97.03%—which was a huge success for our experiment. Let me explain why this happened.

What buying supermarket jam can teach you about email marketing

There’s a strong relationship between supermarket jam and email marketing for the following reason.

Ever heard of Sheena Lyengar’s famous jam study? When participants were presented with a choice of 24 different flavours of jam versus 6 flavors, 3% of customers made a purchase after viewing 24 flavors. Amazingly, 30% of customers bought jam after seeing only 6 flavours.

The conclusion of the study was that human beings are paralyzed when faced with too many options. A plethora of choices is actually demotivating, rather than inspiring.

Keep A/B testing. Never assume anything

The results from our first experiment illuminated that our subscribers responded better to weekly campaigns than bi-weekly, and emails that contained only one choice of content. But we needed to find out just how significant choice really was.

We decided to apply our findings to our own email marketing again by isolating the factor of choice in an A/B test.

Is design or choice the motivating factor?

At this point, we had changed two major components in our email marketing, frequency and newsletter design. We came up with two alternative designs to test against each other:

• Version A: feature post, and 3 supporting links.
• Version B: single feature post.

Our hypothesis was that if reducing choices was the getting more clicks, version B (the single feature post email) would have more clicks. If we were wrong, then we’d be getting more bang for our buck out across clicks to our content in one email.

Check out version A:

With version B, we stuck to just one featured post, and no more links.

We ran our A/B test for 8 weeks using Kayako data, and guess what?

No dramatic difference in performance. Version A accumulated 13 more clicks in the 8 week experiment.

Subscribers weren’t put off by the extra articles to read.

So our conclusion was that choice is not always demotivating. Having a clear intent to your emails and sending them regularly is important.

When are you updating your email design?

B2B emails tend to follow the same format, and often fail to inspire readers. They have one major flaw: too many choices. Try out simplifying your B2B email newsletter design with an A/B test, and see if your results improve.

The reason you want more clicks in your emails might be because you’re trying to move your audience down the funnel or keep up engagement. Ideally, every piece of content you include must contribute towards achieving your goal.

Including as much content as possible, however, doesn’t give your subscribers more incentive to click through. You’re actually demotivating clicks with excessive choice. You’re lessening the chance that they’ll engage with your emails.

Keep your B2B marketing emails laser-focused. Don’t confuse your readers by offering them all the content you published last month.

Instead, tell them exactly what to expect in your email subject title, and keep your email body strictly limited to that topic.

Creating a Content Community: Q&A With nDash’s Co-Founder & VP of Marketing & Community

What’s it like to build a community-based SaaS platform that focuses on creating top-notch content -- yet is also scalable? We spoke with Michael Brown and Matt Solar, the Co-Founder and VP of Marketing & Community at nDash, to learn more about their recent endeavors and visions for what’s to come in the rapidly evolving world of content marketing.

Boston Content: Tell us about nDash! Who do you help and what kinds of problems do you solve?

Michael Brown: nDash.co is a SaaS platform for marketers and agencies that want to scale the content creation process with true subject matter experts. Readers today can spot a fluff piece a mile away, so we’re trying to help brands publish authoritative content, and that can only come from writers with in-depth knowledge of a particular industry. Conversely, we’re also helping talented freelance writers earn multiple times more than they would at a content mill. 

BC: How was the company founded?

Michael: I left Applause (then uTest) in 2013 and started a content marketing agency, which grew from a one-person shop to a full-service, 10-person team in a little under two years. As we grew, the demands of our clients became too much for our in-house writers—in terms of both bandwidth and complexity. One of the biggest challenges was keeping up with the diverse expertise of our customer roster. It’s impossible to have a writer with a deep knowledge of all verticals, so I needed to find a way to cover a broad set of clients -- B2B vs. B2C, clients in entertainment and cyber-security… just massive diversity. Ultimately, we needed to find a way to scale both in terms of volume and specialization.

Having seen firsthand how the successful the crowd-based model can be, we pivoted the company focus and launched the nDash.co community-based SaaS platform that you see today.

Michael Brown, Co-Founder of nDash

BC: How are you doing? (Latest company milestones, etc.)

Michael: So far so good! It’s been just over a year since we launched the platform at HubSpot’s 2016 Inbound conference. Since then we’ve gotten great traction from brands all over the globe, as well as some Boston-based ones like DataDog, AppNeta, Mautic, and ThriveHive to name a few. The community recently surpassed the 5K mark. We’ve added new people to the team, including my former colleague Matt Solar. And lastly, we were named a finalist for the Boston MassChallenge accelerator program. It’s been a fun and eventful year!

BC: What are the top 3 trends you’re seeing in content and marketing?  

Michael: A few years back, the term “content fatigue” gained a lot of traction, but it was mostly used in reference to readers. Now it’s all about content fatigue in marketers. They’re exhausted—and it’s not all about the writing. As more content gets published, it gets harder and harder to find interesting content angles, so they’re burnt out from all of it – the writing, the research, the edits, the cadence, the ideation…the list goes on.

In response, marketers are starting to more closely align their operations to that of leading publishers. They’re realizing that content cannot be a one-person or even a one-department job – that just like the NYT, HuffPo and other publications, content needs to come from a larger network of contributors in order to stay fresh on a consistent basis.

Matt Solar: Relationships win. Despite a surge in AI and bots, I think you’ll see a lot of success for the companies that embrace some of the “old-fashioned” methods of success, namely real customer success and support. There’s a reason why LL Bean has beaten Amazon for customer support for a few years in a row. I think you’ll continue to see marketing teams increasingly embrace customer service as an extension of the brand. Some notorious ISPs have sullied the customer service practice and companies will, hopefully, revert to view customer service as a positive experience and opportunity to create a stark raving fan for your brand. Marketers will need to reflect this in the voice of their content -- regardless of its format.

Matt Solar, nDash's VP of Marketing & Community

Michael: Instagram and Pinterest have launched the category of “influencer marketing” and validated the importance of the personal brand -- phrases we’re waiting to hear uttered on Silicon Valley. Twitter, Medium, and LinkedIn have encouraged people to leverage and even quantify in the form of followers, their subject matter expertise. Nobody, yet, has addressed this opportunity for content marketing, and I predict you’ll see some jostling for this space in the next few years.

BC: What’s the best advice you can give to content writers?

Matt: First, focus on quality. We have no interest in competing on price with content mills, so the differentiation needs to be in speed (e.g. content turnaround time) and quality. Second, don’t be afraid to pitch companies! Do some research and put together a relevant, topical, and/or timely concept (again: focus on quality). When you pitch, don’t sell yourself short when pricing your content. Buyers in any market use price as an early data point and it can impact their perception of the value of the product. As Benjamin Franklin wrote, “The bitterness of poor quality remains long after the sweetness of low price is forgotten.”

BC: What’s the best advice you can give to companies related to content?

Matt: Kissmetrics recently shared a great post, “How to Outperform Sites Ranking Above You on Search Engines”. In it, they wrote that the takeaway is, “You need to produce better content for the end user than the person above you.” I’d recommend companies be cognizant of their strategy and how it balances quantity, which has diminishing returns, and quality. The strategy doesn’t need to be a zero-sum game, meaning it doesn’t need to be quality or quantity, but you should at least be executing deliberately.

We’ve seen success, both as a company and as a viewer to our customer's campaigns, of sourcing the content creation to the nDash community and focusing their internal teams on more strategic initiatives, such as building more holistic marketing campaigns across marketing and sales, and more personalized efforts for targeted accounts. We put together a content pricing guide, “What Every Marketer Needs to Know About Paying Freelancers” as a resource for getting started.

 BC: nDash hasn’t taken any outside funding to date. What has driven that decision and do you envision that will change?

Michael: We simply haven’t needed it as we were able to bootstrap getting a product to market. We’ve been approached in the past and it’s a topic we’ve started discussing internally, but I need more certainty around how we’d leverage the investment and the ROI model and assumptions before we’d move forward.

BC: What’s next for nDash?

Michael: Our mission is to build a product and brand that marketers and writers love. As part of that, we focus on the user experience throughout the lifecycle -- not in the form of adding fancy tech bells and whistles for the sake of challenging our engineering team, but a simple, clean UI through to internal processes and team support. While we do some data analysis around user behaviors the majority of product features come as a result of user feedback derived from real conversations, much like those that Boston Content is helping to facilitate.

BC: Anything else you’d like to share?

Matt: Thank you for letting us participate! We’re really excited to have the opportunity to be part of BosCon’s new growth. There’s so much fragmentation in marketing across tools, responsibilities, and internet resources that it’s great to have a centralized source where so many influencers can leverage each other’s knowledge. We had a great time at the November 28th event, and I know the entire nDash team is already ready for the next one.

nDash.co provides content creation software & services to the world’s leading brands and agencies. Visit nDash.co today to sign up for free and start building your content community.