Why Animated Videos Are Perfect For Social Media Marketing

Why Animated Videos Are Perfect For Social Media Marketing

Animated videos work wonders for social media marketing.

How? First off, remember what the 5 goals of social media marketing are: (1) increase brand awareness, (2) enhance public relations, (3) build a community of advocates, (4) research and development, and (5) driving sales and leads.

Animated videos address each one of these goals perfectly.

How Do They Increase Brand Awareness?

An engaging animated video with your brand’s colors and logo woven throughout sticks in people’s brains. The video delivers an extra-potent dose of memorability where your brand is concerned. It’s much easier to remember a particular brand if it’s associated with fun visuals as opposed to a stand-alone logo on a landing page or an article full of text.

Using animated videos also sets you apart from the ocean of business Facebook pages that are constantly posting uninteresting company photos and updates. If you’ve got a compelling animated video that autoplays on someone’s feed, chances are they’re gonna watch it. This will make your brand more interesting than your competitors.

How Do Animated Videos Enhance Public Relations?

A high-quality animated video shows that you’re serious about delivering your message efficiently. It shows the public that you care about being understood. Even fun or silly videos add an element of legitimacy and professionalism to your brand.

Also, social media is where you find the most accurate info regarding how the public feels about your company. Browsing comments from a meme you shared off someone else’s page is fine. But when you have original, animated content, the percentage of positive feedback is higher. Animated videos lead the public to view your organization as stable and confident.

How Do Animated Videos Build A Community of Advocates?

When someone shares your video, a seed of loyalty is planted. That action proves it spoke to them to the point where they wanted others to experience what they did. Whether your animated video made them laugh, cry, or think, them sharing it is a sure bet that you’ve stuck in their brains. This is the first stage of brand loyalty.

Animation has a way of making people feel comfortable. Helping your audience feel comfortable with your business is an important step toward turning them into an advocate.

How Do Animated Videos Promote Research and Development?

One of the best things about using videos in social media marketing is how easily traceable they are. You can combine the analytic data of both Facebook and the video hosting platform for your benefit. This makes gathering data and putting it to future use so easy.

There’s also evidence suggesting that for businesses, short, animated videos receive more engagement than live-action ones. This is because the nature of animation allows complex ideas to be more easily explained. More engagement means more data which leads to more refined processes.

Plus, they’re cheaper to produce than live-action videos. This leaves you with more marketing dollars to make more videos or put toward further research and development.

How Do Animated Videos Drive Sales and Leads?

Animation is less likely to come across as intrusive marketing. This means that viewers are more likely to get hooked within the first few moments and watch the whole thing. This does wonders for conversion rates.

Why are they less intrusive? Because animated videos are fun, even when they’re talking shop. Being entertained and persuaded at the same time is an age-old marketing tool, and it’s all over social media. Animated videos exude an element of fun, making the purchase more appealing.

There’s also something nostalgic about animation, and nostalgia is huge in our culture right now. It’s a very effective marketing tool, and animation is a great way to tap into that.

Conclusion

If you feel like your social media marketing is lacking and you haven’t commissioned an animated video of some kind, we highly recommend you consider it. It’s worked wonders for our clients’ social media efforts. There’s no reason it won’t work for you.

How To Create The Right Message For You Audience – Moron Monday

How To Create The Right Message For You Audience – Moron Monday

Is your website actually communicating the right message to your audience or turning them away? Don’t let yourself fall into the category of those who are doing things incorrectly! We’ve got plenty of tips that will help guide you to the perfect website and make sure you are sending the right message to your audience.

Take a look at this weeks Moron Monday video to learn what you should and shouldn’t be doing when it comes to your website.

If you missed last weeks episode, you can find it HERE! We talked about how to run successful video ads!


VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION

Hey, what’s up guys? I want to welcome you to another session of Moron Monday.

It’s not Monday, we call it Moron Monday because we just show you the different things that morons do in marketing, and especially video marketing.

Today is probably one of the most important episodes we’ve had. We’ve only had three, but it’s probably one of the most important episodes you’re going to see and continue to see, because we’re going to talk about the words. The words we use and the messaging we use. If you are a business and you are creating a website or you’re creating a new video, it’s really important that you say the right things to get people to take action.

 

 

 

First off, let’s start with what is a USP?

USP is a Unique Selling Proposition.

If somebody comes to your website, they need to know what it is that you do immediately. It needs to pass the five second test.

If you’re creating a video, they need to know “Hey, what is this video about?”. Don’t go into some long old story before you tell them what it’s about. It’s like a trailer.

But you have to have that unique selling proposition and you should take that unique selling proposition across all your platforms.

It needs to be on your social media page, needs to be on your YouTube page, needs to be on your Instagram.

Whatever it is that you are using to get your message in front of people, you need to have your Unique Selling Proposition there.

And then same with your video message, it needs to be in there.

 

 

 

STEP NUMBER 1

This is probably where we see people screw up the most, is with simplicity.

I am a big fan of keeping things simple, and a lot of times when a customer comes to us and they’re like, “Hey, we want you guys to create our script,” (because we do all the scriptwriting when it comes to our videos), most of the time there’s a bit of a clash because what they’re focused on is actually confusing the heck out of the audience.

There’s that knowledge gap where they have been working in that industry, they know everything about it, and then you have a consumer who knows nothing about it.

What happens is they try to take all their jargon, all of their message, all of their features, and they just cram it into a video, and usually it doesn’t turn out good and it confuses the audience.

What we try to do is get them to step back and say, “Hey, let’s keep things simple and do not confuse.” Because if you confuse your audience, you’re going to lose them. They’re going to jump over to somebody else who doesn’t confuse them.

 

 

 

STEP NUMBER 2

 

And then the next thing, everything that you do needs to be customer and problem-solution focused.

Don’t go out there and say we, we, we, we, we.

You need to talk about what it is that you’re going to do for them.

How can you solve their problem? Because people really don’t care about your awards, they don’t care about that kind of stuff.

Now, you do need to show social proof, I’m not saying go get rid of all your awards, go get rid of all your testimonials. No. That comes a little later, like if you’re creating a website, social proof should be down below.

But you don’t want to start off with “we’re the number one lawyer in the world”. And I’m going to show you some examples of different sites.

I’m going to jump over to a simple screencast and give you guys an idea of what to do and what not to do on what makes sense.

So the very first site we’re going to go jump into is a lawyer site.

 

Lawyers are actually notorious for confusing their audience, and they love cramming so much information on above the fold.

It just doesn’t make sense. And people don’t pay attention to it anyway.

 

 

 

 

So the very first one I pulled up was this NevadaDivorce.net. And you will see above the fold, which above the fold is above the crease, you have a bunch of call to actions.

You have a ton of paragraphs. You have no idea what it is that these guys do, I mean they’re divorce attorneys, but it just says Nevada divorce and document service.

Now they have some bullet points, they have a whole paragraph here, paragraph there, and bunch of links on the right, call us … You just don’t know what it is that they actually do here, so most people will bounce.

Compare that to this. Neil Patel. If you don’t know who Neil Patel is, he’s one of the SEO experts out there. He ranks for a lot of different things.

 

 

But on his website he just says “Do you want more traffic?”

Great. You come there and you’re like, “Oh, what it is that Neil does? He gets me more traffic.” Do you want more traffic lead sales? Enter your URL below if you want to grow your traffic and revenue.

And then he has a website. Now, what he’ll do with this website is more of a lead capture. You put your information in here, and that’s it. That’s what his whole website is set up to do.

It’s simple, effective, and I like to use some of his stuff.

Here’s another attorney. I just kind of make fun of attorneys, sorry. But their websites are usually the worst.

 

 

 

So they start off, here’s my number. They’re the 702 Firm.

Now, you have a smiley, a mean, a half-smile guy here, and they’re awarded the best personal injury law firm. That is a hundred percent me, me-focused, it is not consumer-focused.

Best injury lawyers in Las Vegas…personal injuries…

They’re trying to do a lot of stuff with search engine optimization and load it in here, but this whole website does not talk one bit about the consumer.

 

Compared to this. This is StoryBrand.

 

If you don’t know who he is, he actually writes about clarifying your message. So workshops to help you clarify your message, that’s what he does.

He does workshops to help clarify message. And then he just says eliminate confusion, connect with customers, grow your company.

You can see that that is customer-focused and it’s not about him, he doesn’t say, “We do this, this, this, this,” it’s like no, you’re going to eliminate confusion, you’re going to connect with your audience, and grow your company.

And then in the background he actually shows a good image of what’s going on so there’s just no confusion.

 

Compared to this one, this is a mortgage one. So hundreds of mortgage options under one roof.

 

 

Then they have this slider here that is going way too fast. They have nothing here, they just have some images and then this creepy little thing that pops up.

 

 

And then if you scroll down, there’s this long old paragraph here that nobody reads.

If you looked at the bounce rate and just said, “Hey, what happened?”

Now, if you space it out it’s okay to do some paragraphs. I’ll show you what I’m testing right now.

 

Okay, if you jump over onto this page here. I’m testing some longer form because long form sales letters do work.

 

 

It doesn’t all need to be simple, but if you hit the website, a YouTube Campaign can grow your business.

People hit my website, they know what it is on this page. We create YouTube campaigns.

Then I go into these long form paragraphs here, where I talk about what kind of results we get for customers, and this seems to be working.

 

 

But you’ll see I space it out. I very rarely have two sentences per paragraph. I space it out, I highlight it. I don’t make it look all slammed together where people aren’t going to read that stuff.

You don’t need to eliminate all the writing on a website. This seems to be working, and we’ll keep testing.

But the main point it, just don’t confuse your audience.

Keep things simple, don’t confuse them.

Go back through your material.

The best way to get the most out of these courses that we do is go back through your material and apply these things that we talk about. Look at your website messaging and say, “Am I confusing my audience? If they come here, do they know what it is that I do within five seconds?”

And then another big thing, on a website you should have your headline. You can have a sub-headline here.

 

Make sure you have a call to action. You want to say, “Hey, if you’re here at my website, this is what I want you to do. Here’s what you’re going to get.” Don’t forget to put a call to action, and most of those websites that I did show you did not have that.

 

 

Same with video. So video, it needs to kind of fall in the same format, but it’s a little different.

What we like to do on videos is a headline, problem, solution, call to action, and then we’ll extend it out.

There’s a lot of popular videos that have millions of views that follow this same formula. They will do a guarantee, another solution, another call to action.

But don’t forget this call to action in your videos. You want them to do something. After they engage with any of your material, whether it’s brochures, website, videos, you want to ask them to do something so that you can do business. So don’t forget that.

 

And that is it. Go through your stuff, make the changes, and we’ll see you on the next episode.

See you. Peace.

 

Ydraw.com

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The 411 on Social Media and Video Marketing

The 411 on Social Media and Video Marketing

This past week we shipped off two of our Project Managers (Kristen and Lexa) to Miami to teach Estheticians about how they can be using social media and video marketing to grow their business. Here’s a quick run down of what they shared!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

WHY should you be using video in your marketing plan? And HOW should you be utilizing your social media?

Let’s start with video

Let’s be honest, people are lazy these days and don’t care to read a bunch of information. This is where video comes in. Getting them to click play is a much easier task, than getting them to read paragraphs of information. BUT there are things you need to consider when creating a video to use.

For example, our attention spans are down to a record low and we have 5 seconds, yep you heard me…5 SECONDS to grab our viewers attention. This means you SHOULD NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCE start with branding. You don’t need an opening title that has your logo, or anything like that. If you choose to do that, before you know it your 5 seconds have passed and your potential customer is long gone. Instead, you’ll want to jump into your subject right away.  Then proceed to EDUCATE your audience. More education, and less promotion. Try to focus your content on your CUSTOMERS needs. What do THEY want to see, and how can YOU help THEM. Solve their problems and they’re a customer for life. Try to stay away from only talking about your company, and how great you are. Your content should speak for itself.

Not sure where to start when it comes to implementing video? Here’s some advice.

Create a library of the following types of video:
1. 3 WHY Videos (1 minute each)
-Share WHY you are doing what you are doing
-Start with 3 60 second videos
2. 3 HOW Videos (1 minute each)
-Share educational videos
-Start with 3 60 second videos
3. 3 ALL TO ACTION Videos (1 minute each)
-Share promotional videos with a call to action at the end

Tip: Check out what your competitors are doing and then think like your customer…what would YOU want to see if you were them.

Okay, so you’ve created your video library, but now what?

RUN VIDEO AD CAMPAIGNS! This is an amazing tool that not enough people are taking advantage of. Through video ads you can get your video in front of your ideal client. This kind of marketing is genius. You can determine your audience by selecting the location, age group, gender, languages, demographics, interests, behaviors, and more. Now if we are being honest here (and we always are), anyone can set up an ad campaign but they require trial and error to determine how to best utilize them. If you have the budget, hire a professional (spoiler: that’s us, we are the professionals). They’ll be able to better track what is and isn’t working for you, so that they can adjust your campaigns.

Moving on to social media

When somebody comes to your page, it’s important that we immediately draw them in and give them a reason to click “follow”. You don’t want them to be confused about who or what they are following.

4 THINGS TO INCLUDE IN YOUR BUSINESS BIO:
WHO: Who you are/company name.
WHAT: What you do. State the products/ services you offer.
CALL TO ACTION: Website, booking site, etc.
OFFER: Discount code, link to tutorial, etc.

 

Keep in mind what the goal is. We want to use social media to grow and showcase our business and what we have to offer. Don’t show your personal life, what your eating, etc. This doesn’t create value or give your follower a reason to stick around.

Other things you can be doing with your social media:
-Create a personalized hashtag to use on your posts
-Post on your story
-Share customer testimonials
-Create videos to share on IGTV
-Tell your customers/clients to share your product/service on their social media and offer them a discount for any referrals (People want social proof)
-Repost content that your customers/clients share
-Utilize your highlight stories (Share things here that answer your FAQs. This will help make it so you don’t have to answer the same questions all of the time
-Interact with others from your profile (reply to comments/questions you get, comment on other accounts, etc)
-If applicable, use influencers to help spread the word about your business

Other important factors:
-DO NOT post a bunch of stock images/graphics. Be creative and authentic with your posts.
-Produce content that sets you apart from your competitors.
-BE CONSISTENT: Whether its posting weekly or daily, make sure that your profile is up-to-date so people know you are serious about your business.

 

So the question of the day is what can YOU do to better your social media and video marketing game?

We Don’t Read Minds!

When talking with a Project Manager or other Creative here at Ydraw, it is important to help us understand exactly what your company wants.

Otherwise, how can we blow your mind with incredibly awesome and mystical videos?

One of our favorite things is getting to work with heaps of companies with unique brands and differing requests. Unfortunately, working with a wide range of opinions can make it difficult for our team to pinpoint your companies wishes.

It’s true…we are made of stardust and wishes and magical things, but let me tell you a secret…we can’t actually read minds.

I know, weird right?

For years, we have been diligently looking for a mind-reading crystal ball and unfortunately haven’t found one yet. But…we haven’t given up hope just yet, so we will let you know when that happens!

Until then…

It’s important that we continue to ask lots of questions and paramount that you and your team clearly communicate your wishes.

If you don’t know what you want, and we don’t know what you want, we’re just shooting in the dark. And although our accuracy is near perfect… we aren’t quite there yet.

Listen, we do this all day every day, so trust us when we say we don’t get our feelings hurt. We love working with diverse companies and that is why we have made our process collaborative and flexible.

So be raw, be truthful and communicate clearly.

By the way…

We are POSITIVE that if we did have a crystal ball, it would tell us that YOU ARE FULL OF MAGIC!!

Your 2018 Video Marketing Budget: Use It Or Lose It!

We’re coming up on the end of the year, folks! It’s time to look back on your company’s marketing expenditures, evaluate your results and begin planning for the year to come.

But wait, not so fast!

Though it’s always important to look ahead don’t forget to follow through with 2018’s marketing campaigns and finish the year out with a video-marketing bang!

Most companies slow their marketing efforts as the year-end approaches. By consciously doing the opposite of this common trend, you can gain a competitive edge to break away from the pack by keeping your marketing push strong right up until the 2019 ball drops.

 

Top 3 reasons to for beefed-up fourth quarter marketing:

  1. Spending Deadlines:It ain’t over, till it’s over.

As the year comes to a close, some departments may locate excess budget floating around. With the “use it or lose it” policy found in most organizations, department managers are looking for opportunities to spend these additional dollars.

Don’t let your department get passed up. Be vocal and visible with your video campaign ideas just in case these other departments are looking for ways to spend their dollars.

Stay on top of your marketing efforts. This includes value-based bullet points that highlight achievable results in the current year and extending into the next year. Being organized and keeping your campaigns rolling forward can help justify last minute marketing purchases.

  1. 2019’s Budget:Spend More Now= Get More Later.

Now is the time when many companies start kicking off their budgeting efforts and mapping out spend for next year.

During this time, department heads are looking for ways to get the biggest bang for their budgeting buck.

This also makes now a good time to use the current year’s budget to get a head start on next year’s campaigns… think ahead by producing next year’s content NOW!

  1. Marketing Momentum:Stay Visible To Your Audience.

Don’t let preparations for a busy first quarter make you invisible to your customers during the Holidays.

This is the most wonderful time of the year, where they are programmed to spend some serious $$$. Keep your products and services in view with some fresh videos.

Ongoing communications is key to creating leads and keeping your target prospective customers engaged.

 

Video and Marketing Are A Match Made In Heaven

If you want your message to find it’s way in front of a set of eyeballs and a pair of ears, the proof of video’s prowess is in the statistical pudding:

  • 75 Million people in the U.S. watch online videos everyday.
  • Merely mentioning the word ‘video’ in an email subject line, the click-through rate increased by 13%.
  • Nearly 50% of all video is watched on a mobile device.
  • By 2019, internet video traffic will account for 80% of all consumer Internet traffic
  • Videos up to 2 minutes long get the most engagement.

 

Create Videos Now

These forgotten fourth quarter months can be the prime time to wrap up 2018 with a video that will create a buzz leading into the new year while also increasing your spend that may lead to more funding for the future!

Creating new content can ensure ongoing communication with your audience while building and maintaining brand recognition. This constant buzz breathes life into your value proposition, year round.

 

2018 Budget: Use It Or Lose It… Create With Ydraw And Market Strong All Year Long