Month: May 2018

How to Filter Spam Traffic From Google Analytics [Infographic]

Posted on by NextJSjointviews

As we all know, Google Analytics is the most powerful web analytics service on the Internet. It’s a powerful tool which provides in-depth insights of the website traffic. As it helps to make decisions based on the data it is easier to measure the performance of the marketing goals.

There are many other web analytics tools such as Kissmetrics, Woopra, Piwik, Clicky, and Audience Data & Content Analytics for Digital Media, etc.

Despite the good number of competitors, Google Analytics still remains unbeaten on the top owing to its built- in filter functionality. This helps against spam, bots, and other junk traffic that damage the integrity of the data.

But, are we following the right practices to install filters on our websites? Of course, not. Most websites don’t use filters or they use them but in the wrong way.

Here’s an infographic illustrating the right practices to filter spam from Google Analytics.

Take a quick look!

filter spam from google analytics

A Complete Guide to Infographic Marketing

Posted on by NextJSjointviews

If you have a content marketing plan, there are good chances that it will have visual format of content such as video and infographic. Infographic became popular back in 2010 and have been here ever since.

Although marketers debated their survival with the internet becoming overcrowded with too many infographics, good quality infographics are still the cornerstone of a good content marketing plan.

Many successful marketers swear by them. They can get you tons of backlinks and some serious traffic. Marketing guru Neil Patel was able to pull in more than 2 million visitors and 41,142 backlinks by posting regular infographics on his Kissmetrics blog back in 2010. Most of leading digital marketing agencies and brands are using infographics by now.

According to a study by Infographic World, 56% of companies surveyed had used infographics and 84% considered them effective in marketing.

In this blog we will look at why infographic are so effective and how to be successful at infographic marketing. Let’s first look at what an infographic is and what are the various types of infographic you can design.

Contact Jointviews

What is Infographic?

Infographic is a visual image of information or data in its strictest sense. The visual representation could be process flow, timeline, comparison charts or sequential story too. There are many ways to represent information visually. Many infographics tell a story through the presentation of facts and statistics to add an element of surprise and evidence.

However, not all infographics should to have statistics and numbers. In fact, today, the types of infographics that we see are many. As long as it is an image that translates knowledge visually it counts as an infographic.

Types of Infographics

Here are some types of infographic and their examples.

1. Statistical  Infographics

These convey statistics in a visual way and have a story to it. They are great for getting backlinks and social shares.

Infographic Marketing

2. Informational Infographics

This is a blog post turned into a visual infographic. This can be a list-o-graphic, a process or educational guide. The idea here is to show visually what a blog post would say in text.

3. Timeline Infographics

These show the evolution of products, service, culture, etc.

Infographic Marketing

4. Comparison Infographic

These compare products, service, concepts or processes. They make it easy for our brain to compare by placing the compared ideas next to each other and bring out the difference.

Infographic Marketing

5. Geographic Infographic

This is an infographic putting together regional statistics or information on the corresponding map of a region. This is useful in representing information related to geography or showing geographical differences.

What makes Infographic So Effective?

Traffic to a website gets an average of 12% increase after uploading an infographic. So why are infographics so effective in getting traffic?

Infographics are visual

Our brains process visuals 60,000 times faster than text according to 3M. 90% of information that goes to our brain is visual and we also easily retain what we see visually.

This is because the visual part of our brain has evolved for millions of years whereas the reading has been introduced to humans on recently in comparison.

We are naturally attracted to images and spend more time with articles/ blogs that have relevant images. In fact, eye-tracking studies show that readers spend more time looking at relevant images than they do reading text on a page.

Infographics are Shareable

People only share what they think will be enjoyed by their friends or help them. Since infographics are a story narrative with interesting facts and entertaining information they are perfect to share with your friends on social media.

Infographics are shared 3x times more than any other content on social media. They are easy to view, consume and share.

They Work for your SEO

Infographics do not directly translate into higher ranking but they do give out many signals that are great for your SEO. Informative infographics get lots of links from other sites. This not only increases traffic to your site but also tells Google that other people find your page helpful. This increases your domain authority, in turn boosting your visibility in Google.

Infographics also mean that visitors spend more time on your site and reduce bounce rate. This too is a factor affecting Google ranking directly.

Elements of Successful Infographic

Of course this does not mean that every infographic will be highly successful and get you links. Ever since the success of infographics online, the internet is flooded with infographics that are of poor quality (either in content or design or both) and are not successful by any measure.

Making an infographic that is not up to the mark will only waste your time and resources. Therefore, it is important to make high quality infographics if you want to succeed at infographic marketing.

There are many things that must be kept in mind for this. Let’s walk through the process of making and promoting a good quality infographic. We will discuss the best practices in each step as we come to it.

1. Set the Objective

What is the objective of making infographic? Is it to earn backlinks, convert leads or increase your brand authority?  Not every infographic is suitable for all purpose. For example, if you want to earn backlinks, an infographic with original data is your best bet.

The designing of your infographic will also depend on your objective. Infographics meant for PR or internal communication can have heavy branding whereas those built for social sharing cannot have much branding on them.

Before you set out decide on length of infographic, colour scheme, design and content, it is first important to set the context right.

2. Select  Topic

Knowing your audience is the key to creating the right content. The same is true for infographics. Infographic topics have to be either extremely helpful or entertaining.

The topic must answer your reader’s questions to be helpful and relatable to be entertaining. It should also be about a topic that has decent search traffic too.

One way to come up with a good topic is to look at the posts that are already popular in your sites. What posts drive maximum traffic and reader engagement? You may then repurpose old content or convert it into an infographic.

For example, if ‘Industry Stats for 2017’ was one of your best performing posts, you can consider making an infographic for ‘Industry Stats for 2018’.

Another way to pick a topic is to just tag along what’s trending. Topics or events that are in news are hot because media and social influencers are already covering it. If you can put a fresh angle to trending topics or add data to it, it is very likely to be picked up by journalists and bloggers and go viral.

3. Research Well

The next step after choosing a topic is to do a thorough research of the topic. Remember your content is only as good as the research that goes behind it. Talk to industry experts and try to dig out information that is not out yet.

There is nothing better than your own data from studies you have done. Bloggers and journalists love fresh content and stats to cite and prove their point.

Make sure your sources are credible and reputable. Wikipedia does not count as a credible source. You must also mention the sources at the bottom of your infographic to add credibility to your data.

5. Script and Story

The next step after you gathers data and information is to put it in a meaningful narrative. Most of the infographics fall flat here. Putting data and statistics in visual format is not a good infographic.

Content creators must tell a story through the information. This is what makes infographics captivating and shareable. Think of all the elements of story – a beginning state of things, struggle or objections and an end with a clear message of the story.

Sometimes you may want to develop a character to convey a story. At other times the reader’s journey itself can be a story. This stage requires lot of creativity and innovation.

At the end of this designers typically build a wireframe that puts all the information in a flow. By the end of this you should have a visual of how your infographic is going to look.

6. Designing

It’s time to convert your story into visuals and usually a designer works on this stage. There are many decisions that must be made when it comes to design.

What would be the best way to put the story in visuals? The infographic could be any of the type discussed above i.e. statistical, comparison, bar-chart, geographical or timeline.

The colours must be in line with the topic and appeal to the target audience. If you plan to brand your infographic the colours must also be in line with your branding.

The icons, 3D effects, fonts, formats and colours all will give your infographic a unique look and feel.

7. Editing

The next step is editing. By this stage you would have a first version of your infographic ready with you.  You must now improve on it and cut out all the information that is not central to your message.

Just like a good written copy, cutting out the extras is what makes an infographic great. Don’t put data just for the sake of length. It is better to aim for an infographic that is shorter, to the point and crisp. The flow of information should feel interesting and intuitive.

8. Promote

Left by itself, it will take some time for infographic to start ranking in Google. If there are already better infographics by more authoritative sites in your industry, then you can forget about ranking ever on Google.

Promoting infographics helps in getting quicker return and early discovery by search engines. There are steps that you must take to promote your infographic.

SEO for Infographic – Search engines cannot read images hence it is important to give them text and HTML tags that they can. This is how search engines view your page is about and whether of not to rank them for a query.

Insert your keywords in the title of the image as well as alt text. So if your infographic is about coffee name the image file as ‘benefits-of-coffee.png’ instead of ‘image1456.png’.

This way search engines can easily know what your infographic is about. Similarly, alternative text is what shows up when your image doesn’t load but it is also a signal on image content to Google.

Also add supporting text before and after your infographic. This way you can have Headings H1, introduction paragraph and a conclusion that will be enough for Google to rank you well.

Blogger Outreach – A good infographic will earn backlinks naturally but you can kick-start your efforts with an outreach campaign too. Get in touch with industry influencers and leaders and let them know of this new infographic you have posted.

They will link to it if they find it useful. If they do not, then take it as feedback for you to improve your infographic. Do be spammy with your request or post your link in the comments as that will only hurt your credibility.

Sharing on other Platforms – You can share your infographics on other platforms too. Posting on LinkedIn and SlideShare have proved successful for many brands. We will discuss more on how to optimize your infographic for different platforms in the next section.

Make it Easily Shareable – Your infographic must be shareable on social media with a single click. Put social sharing buttons on your page and mention an embed code below the infographic. This way anyone who wants to use your infographic can do so with a legitimate link to you.

9. Test

The last step of infographic marketing is of course monitoring and feedback collection. Each site will have unique visitor profile and hence different kinds of designs, topics and promotional strategies will work for each. By monitoring user engagement and feedback you can fine-tune your infographic content marketing to perfection.

Tips to get Maximum out of your Infographics

1. Create Quality Infographics

As you can see above there are plenty of things that can go wrong in each stage of creating an infographic. Since you are putting in so much effort, it’s worth ensuring that you end up with good quality infographic.

Many companies think that their good content writer will also make a good infographic. This is not true as the skill required for visualising and designing visuals are totally new to a content writer.

It’s recommended to get your infographic done from a professional designer or at least learn about design before you design it yourself.

Below is an example of confusing infographic. The numbers are all over the place and there is no flow of story to the visuals. The small font is also very difficult to read. Such infographics can actually annoy readers and spoil your brand name.

Infographic Marketing

2. Use Different Platforms to Promote

Post your infographic on more than just your blog. Take the example of below infographic by a security network company, Solera Networks. Their infographic on ‘Are you a Hacker’s Target?’ did not get a great response.

But it became immensely successful after they cut the graphic into slides and shared it on SlideShare platform getting them 40,000 views and organic links.

Infographic Marketing

The lesson is to re-design your infographic and share it on different platforms your audience is on. You never know, the infographic that is not getting any traffic to your site might just hit it off on Facebook or Pinterest.

The key is to repurpose your content to match the mood of each social sharing platform. Pinterest is highly design based so too many numbers and data will not do well there.

Similarly, Facebook needs photos that are interesting and entertaining and too much of branding will not work in this social site.

There are also many niche sites for each target audience that you should explore. Imgur is a great platform for millennial males. You can also find sub-reddits on almost any topic.

3. Make it a Part of your overall Content Strategy

This is perhaps the most common mistake marketers make. You cannot treat your infographic like a stand alone piece of content. Infographics have to fit into your overall content marketing strategy. They must still address you target audience and target the questions they are asking.

Also infographics marketing cannot be your only content strategy. Build supporting text posts, images and videos that together form your content plan.

It is also important to keep in mind what format your audience prefers, if your audience prefers only ‘how to videos’, then building infographics just for the sake of it is a loss making idea.

How much does it cost to make an Infographic?

Infographics can cost anywhere from $5 to $5000. There is a lot of work from research to designing to promoting an infographic. The cost will also depend on the amount of work you need to get done.

You can expect less cost if you already have the data and just need the designer to put it together visually. However if you want research, content, designing, promotion of the infographic you can expect a significantly higher quote.

Here are your options at different price points if you want to get an infographic done:

1. Do It Yourself

This is the cheapest but obviously requires your time and effort. This option is suitable for small start-ups, independent bloggers and home run businesses.

You can choose many online tools available to design your own infographic. Sites like Picktochart and Canva are almost free and come with many free templates, design ideas and inspirations.

You can get started for free on both the tools, although there is limited you can do with Picktochart on the free model. They have a $15, $29 and $99 plan which give you access to templates, hundreds of images, watermark removal and much more.

Canva allows you to do much more with their free plan and is by far the best option to create drag and drop free infographic yourself.

You can also learn to operate tools such as illustrator and coral draw to create your own infographics but they will take up a lot of time to learn.

Remember that for this option you will have no help with designing and storytelling and will have to do everything on your own.

2. Hire a Freelancer

Your next option is to hire an infographic designer on project basis. You can hire one from your contacts of go to numerous freelancing sites online to hire freelancers from across the globe.

Sites like Upwork, Fivver, Design Hill , Freelancer.in and many more will give you many options to choose designers. Design Hill runs a contest for you starting at $289 where you get to pick from more than 40 designs submitted by designers competing for your project.

You can find freelance infographic designer anywhere in the range of $100 to $2000 depending on their quality of work, experience and demand.

Terms of payment, timely completion of work, negotiations, and dispute handling are some of the tricky things when it comes to hiring a freelancer on the other end of the globe.

3. Hire a full time Designer

You could also hire a full time designer in your company. This is only suitable if you have an internal content team and expect to churn our high number of infographics regularly.

The cost of hiring a full time infographic designer can vary anywhere from $800 to $3000 a month. Cost of hiring, training and employee benefits are some extra charges that you will have to bear.

4. Hire a Professional Agency

This is perhaps the best option if you have the budget. There is no risk of unfinished work and unprofessional services as in the case of freelancer. You can find reputable digital marketing agencies that will design infographics within your overall content marketing strategy.

There are even niche digital marketing companies that only make infographics. Check out Neomam’s work on interactive Infographics to see the possibilities with Infographics

These agencies may charge you anywhere from $500 to $5000 per infographic. You may get a better deal if your agency handles all of your content marketing and charges you for the whole package.

Some of the known names in field are Only Infographics, Visual.ly and DKNewMedia. DKNewMedia and Visual.ly are premium agencies and are known to charge in the range of $4000 and above.

Not all agencies are expensive though. There are many lesser known agencies that do an excellent job minus the exorbitant price.

Bringing It All Together

Infographics are great to capture your audience because they are visual stories that people love to read. By inserting data and statistics you can make them helpful as well as interesting for your readers. They work because visual, are sharable and easily digestible.

Creating an effective infographic that gets you tons of traffic requires that you set a clear objective for it. The infographic must answer what your audience is interested in and have a compelling story and design. Promoting infographic on various platforms is equally important to get early traffic.

Lastly remember to treat infographics as a part of your overall content marketing strategy and not a standalone piece.

Whether you decide to make your own Infographic or hire and agency, a good quality and helpful infographic is sure to get you backlinks, earn traffic and improve your brand awareness.

10 Distinct Benefits of Video Marketing for Small Businesses

Posted on by NextJSjointviews

‘Less is more’ is the thumb rule of marketing.  There is no better way than a video to convey your brand message in lesser time with a deeper meaning to a broader audience.

Videos are the best marketing tool for small businesses. It has high ROI and a better reach. With many marketers vying for the small internet space, videos are a useful tool to make your presence felt online.

There is no denying the fact that video marketing is one of the newest entrants in the promotion mix, something that gained popularity after the advent of digital marketing. However, small marketers still have many doubts before venturing into video marketing.

Contact Jointviews

Is it worth the time and effort to consider using videos for promotion or not? Do I have enough resource to create one?  Such questions regularly pop up in their minds to which they do not always get a satisfactory answer.

Here are 10 reasons why video marketing is a profitable way to promote business for small business owners and how they can use it to their advantage.

1. Videos generate trust:

Based on building relationships, video marketing works on the simple fact that ‘Action speaks louder than words.’ When you convey your message to your audience through a video, you establish an emotional connection with them.

Videos give you the flexibility to capture the sentiments of your audience. Therefore, it empowers you to build a long-term relationship with your clients.

2. Boost conversion:

Yes, videos boost conversion by 80%. When you add a product video to your landing page, it helps your viewers make an instant and informed decision. They make the purchase which eventually increases your conversion and your sales.  It is, therefore, a wise decision to add videos to your promotion box and consider it more of an investment rather than an expense.

3. Google finds it easily: Ever searched for ‘How To’ on Google observed the striking results it offers. It is because Google loves videos and display them instantly when someone searches for it.

Videos, when embedded on your website or present via a Youtube link, have a higher chance of drawing customers to your website. This results in more traffic and more ROI.

4. Videos are self-explanatory:

While website content and blogs can sometimes be long to read, videos engage a customer for a few seconds to a minute to explain the concept.

Consider a new product you have just launched and want to inform customers about the same, which option you would choose, a blog or a video. Certainly creating a video works like 98% users say that they watch an explainer video to learn about a product or service.

5. Easy to share on social platforms:

When we talk about viral content, it is always the video that comes to our mind. Videos score over any other marketing tool when it comes to create viral content. Since videos are easy to share on social platforms and also on platforms such as Whatsapp and Hangouts, it has a wider reach and chances of more people viewing it are always high.

Today, more than 60% of social marketers make use of video content to convey their message and finds it more effective than any other marketing tool.

6. Improves search engine rank:

We all love to watch videos, and it is a great tool when it comes to sales and conversion. It is also good for how search engine evaluates your website.

With tools like Google Analytics, you can check the number of times visitors accessed your website and how long they stay by checking the bounce rate. You will observe a stark difference in the bounce rate and other parameters after you have implemented your video marketing strategy.

7. It makes you look modern:

Video marketing is considered as the latest and the most advanced marketing tool. When customers saw your product or brand video, they perceive your company as one with a modern approach. They appreciate businesses which are up-to-date and want to associate with such companies.

8. Videos are still not used by many small businesses:

Accept it or not, there are marketers who despite knowing the importance of video marketing, are not using it in their promotion mix. This gives you an advantage over other small businesses and even your competitors. You can create your niche with the help of videos and customers will remember you for a long time because of your video marketing strategy.

9. Power of Live videos:

Everyone is using Live streaming via Periscope or Facebook Live. Although a bit difficult and not everyone’s cup of tea, it is still prevalent among business owners and celebrities. The most significant benefit is it encourages people to engage and post comments. It instantly involves people as they can see response to their comments. It becomes easy to reach your target audience with such a tool.

10.Video appeal to mobile users:

Mobile phones and videos go hand in hand. Most of the consumers watch videos on their mobile, and since the number of mobile users is increasing, videos will gain more popularity.

Tying It All Together

Video advertising has now become more widespread and affordable too. It has a global reach and has the potential of reaching every consumer, be it any location, age and interest group. The key however still lies in creating an enticing video with precise content. It requires a creative mindset and knowledge of human psychology to create a video.

Small business owners should make it an integral part of their business promotion and use it to the maximum of their advantage.

Who is a Content Marketing Manager? What does he do?

Posted on by NextJSjointviews

If you have created content or worked on digital marketing you may have come across the role of a content marketing manager in your agency. In this post we will share the role of content marketing manager and what he/she can do to grow your business online.

But first it is important to understand how content marketing fits into digital marketing.

How Content Marketing Fits into Digital Marketing

Digital marketing is a channel of marketing to build an online following for your brand on the internet. This could be through website traffic, email subscribers or YouTube channel followers.

Whatever the platform, the aim is to build brand awareness and convert visitors into leads and customers. Email marketing, social media campaigns, content marketing etc. are all part of digital marketing.

Content marketing forms the foundation of all digital marketing, since it is content that gives value to your visitors and converts them into your loyal audience, followers and subscribers. Content consists of text posts, infographics, videos, audio podcasts etc.

Contact Jointviews

No matter what strategy you use digitally, good content is always going to be essential for it to succeed. For example, email marketing will require regular content that your subscribers find relevant and helpful. Without helpful content nobody will open your emails and they might even unsubscribe from the list.

Content marketing manager is someone who creates high quality helpful content with the aim of growing a loyal audience online. There are many activities and processes that form part of creating content. Let’s see what these activities are to understand them better.

Scope of Work

Content creation starts with researching deeply on the target audience. Understanding reader’s pain points and building content around it is essential to create relevant content. Without this, you risk putting out content that no one is even interested in reading.

Content managers can build on it if this information is already available with marketing department in the form of buyer personas and target market studies done.  If not, then it is the content manager’s job to find out about their audience.

Converting knowledge gained on target audience into a content strategy is the next step. This involves setting measurable targets (growth in subscribers, increased CTR, increases conversions etc.) and developing a plan to achieve this. There are two parts to this-

1.Content planning – involves building a plan that details what content topics should be covered, in what format and on what channel. For example, a content manager may choose YouTube for educational videos or write a long form content on the blog.

Here the content marketing manager decides everything down to titles for the blog to the timeline for completion of each content piece. This plan has to be flexible enough to change in response to audience, market and competitors.

2. Content Plan Execution – This is the process of executing the content plan. Activities involve writing, video production, social media posting, sending emails and audience engagement. There is team of writers, video production, social media manager etc. that the manager must work with.

Lastly, content marketing manager must monitor content performance parameters and come up with ideas to continuously better the content. Feedback and customer engagement is an important part of successful content strategy.

Roles of a Content Marketing Manager

Roles of a Content Marketing Manager

As you can see the scope of content marketing manager’s role is big. It stretches from research to project management and more. Therefore there are many roles and duties that he or she must deliver on.

  • Manage Team

A content marketing manager has to manage a team of writers, SEO specialist, video producer and social media manager. Depending of the size of the company some people may take on multiple roles.

It is advisable to have a team doing all of this as managing all of this by one person is very difficult for a brand. Some start-ups may start with only person for content but if you want to run campaigns that have a big impact then you will have to grow your team.

So he/she must also have management and leadership skills to manage a diverse set of people.

  • Content Strategy

As mentioned above setting a content strategy and plan (both are different) is the role of content marketing manager. This strategy must fit well with the overall marketing strategy of the company (offline marketing) and the business goals.

This requires someone who has experience and far sighted vision for the brand. This is why it is advisable to have someone with a good amount of digital marketing experience as a content manager.

  • Project Management

Implementing content plan requires project management role. Not everything will go as planned and there might be hurdles like delay in content completion, video production, negative feedback by audience. Content marketing manager has to be quick to make changes in such a case. He or she has to make sure all the projects within the plan are working in coordination.

  • Cross-functional collaboration

There are many functions a content manager has to work with. In fact there is no department that will not come in contact with content team .They have to work with products team to understand the product/service, collaborate with marketing team to work within branding guidelines and customer insights.

The more people content marketing manager works with, the better will be the content created.

  • Initiating Marketing Campaigns

Marketing campaigns give a boost to your online audience and increases brand recall.

Content marketing manager proactively launches online marketing campaigns. This could be influencer marketing campaign, email campaign, social media giveaways or live webinars. He is responsible for generating new ideas and testing them out too.

 Putting It All Together

Content marketing manager is responsible for making a content strategy and executing it to grow online audience. Their role starts from studying the target audience to developing valuable and relevant content for them.

For this they manage a diverse set of team and collaborate with almost all functions to come up with content that converts visitors into leads and customers.

Why Hire a B2B Content Marketing Agency in 2018

Posted on by NextJSjointviews

B2B businesses are excessively talking about the need for a content marketing agency today. Hiring a content marketing agency is like having a support for your in-house team. They extend your resources and help you save time to focus on other activities.

Here are some important reasons why you need to hire a B2B content marketing agency in 2018:

1. Limited Internal Resources

One of the most important reasons to look at hiring a content marketing agency is limited internal resources. Most companies have a small content marketing team, who while being highly qualified don’t have enough time to prepare and execute a comprehensive content marketing approach. The content marketing agency helps to fill these gaps.

2. Sharing Your Story

Most B2B owners know that they do not have an interesting story. But not sharing the story at all gives these B2B businesses an impersonal, boring, and functional image. A content marketing agency focuses on the story you have and shapes it into an appropriate marketing strategy. It allows you to connect with your target audience keeping their perspective in mind.

Specialists at a content marketing agency understand what communication appeals to the target audience. They explain how your services can offer solutions to make their lives simpler. With the right story and right marketing strategy, you carve your own niche and establish a relationship with the people.

3. A Team of Specialists

Words play an important role in painting a picture of your business. Even if you offer something boring, content marketing experts have the acumen to prepare it interestingly.

When you hire a content marketing agency, you work with a team of specialists who are skilled in a particular area. They are constantly involved in the task of creating content and understand the target audience’s expectations well.

4. Produce More Content

Content marketing today means constantly churning high-quality blogs and articles. Small B2B teams cannot keep up with the pace of content development required to meet industry demands.

A content marketing partner not only assists you with the preparation of a suitable strategy for your brand. It decides on the types of content you require to reach your target audience. Finally, it also produces this content for you in your voice creating a dialogue with the audience.

5. Updated with the Current Trends

When working with an agency, you are certain that the experts are aware of the latest marketing trends. Internal content marketing professionals have a knowhow of what’s happening in the industry.

Agency specialists, on the other hand, also understand what’s working in different industries with increased exposure. They work on client campaigns on a regular basis. They understand the pros and cons of every tool that is implemented and only choose to use the best.

6. Vendor Relationships

For the success of a comprehensive B2B content marketing strategy, it is vital to use different channels, software, and tools. This way campaigns produce the right results. Owing to their nature of work, content marketing agencies have ongoing relationships with different vendors.

 When a company hires a content marketing agency, it can leverage from the bonds that these agencies have with third-party vendors. Establishing connections with several different types of vendors on its own can be difficult, especially for a B2B small business.

7. Cost-Effectiveness

This may sound contradictory but is true. Establishing an internal content marketing team will require employees with various skills. It will also require subscriptions for different software for campaign management.

Even if you hire the various positions at entry level, you will be spending much more than what you would with an agency. Therefore, when you compare salary costs with retainer fees, you will definitely want to pay the retainer fees.

8. Lead Generation

Last but not least, B2B content marketing agencies help to drive and track leads. They concentrate on every lead that is generated and ensure that you do not miss out any. They have the right software to measure deliverables and map the output they have reaped from different efforts.

Hiring a B2B content marketing agency is advisable for most B2B firms today. It eases out the process of creating content allowing in-house teams to focus more on sales and customer service. Firms can focus on their growth projections and improve revenue goals without hiring specialist employees for these fields.

Get Ready for Voice Search Revolution

Posted on by NextJSjointviews

Imagine shopping for grocery, cooking and watering your garden all at the same time. With voice search and voice command technology this is absolutely possible today.

Voice search is simply searching the web by speaking to a device instead of typing it out. You may have already used this technology in your android phone while searching Google or in Google keyboard to convert speech to text in WhatsApp .In fact Location World estimates that 2 in 5 adults use voice search once daily.

Here are some statistics on voice search to get you up to date on how people are talking (or will be talking) to devices:

  • 20 % of queries on Google mobile app and on Android devices were voice searches back in 2016 (Google)
  • Voice search will be 50% of total searches by 2020 (ComScore)
  • About 30% of all searches will be done without a screen by 2020, (Gartner)
  •  There will be an estimated 21.4 million smart speakers in the US by 2020
  • As of January 2018, there were an estimated one billion voice searches per month (Alpine.AI)
  • 1 in 4 shoppers used voice assistants in their holiday shopping during the 2017 season (CTA)
  • 35.8% of millennials already use voice-enabled digital assistants at least once a month (eMarketer)

The rise of Voice Search

The rise of Voice Search

It is clear from the statistics that voice search is gaining momentum and will be at its peak by 2020. Sales of smart speakers like Amazon Echo and Google Home are skyrocketing. Echo Dot was the best selling product on Amazon for the holiday season of 2018.

Even without the statistics it is easy to anticipate that voice search will increase. We humans can speak 3x times faster than we can write. It also allows people to multitask while they are driving, cooking or doing household chores.

Contact Jointviews

This is great for millennials who are hard pressed for time and like to multi-task. But this is also extremely convenient for older generation who will prefer speaking to typing it out. For example, it would be really easy for senior citizens to tell virtual assistants to order medicine rather than going out and getting it.

Although, only 10% of baby boomers use voice search compared to 35% of millennials, the habit will catch up soon with every generation because of voice as more natural communication channel.

This does not however mean that text search will completely fade off any time soon. There are some limitations to voice search because of which visual results will always have its own share.

Limitations of Voice Search

Users don’t always want one best answer

Voice search gives only one best answer always. But users are sometimes looking for options rather than one best result. Consider shopping for shoes on Amazon. You would definitely like to see a few options before telling Alexa to place an order.

As of now voice search results seem best for day to day transactional and informational searches. Until there is a way to overcome this limitation, users will prefer to screen to shop for products and services.

Voice search does not give visual information

What about ‘How to’ searches? Some information is best absorbed visually rather than auditorily. You would like to see how to bake a cake rather than hear it. This is why Google has started ranking videos and images over text for ‘How to’ searches wherever possible.

Users cannot surf the Internet

Surfing the internet is an experience in itself. Some people do this to learn about interesting things or pass their time. It is an interesting place where you can stumble upon something unexpected and new. This again cannot be replaced by voice results.

For the purpose of research and in-depth learning too, text is better. You can re-read the article at your own pace while making mental models of what is being read.

Voice search doesn’t give Privacy

Nobody will be comfortable with Google announcing their search results to the whole house every time. This limitation can be overcome by smart earphones, but until then people will prefer visual results on their private screens.

How does voice search work?

how does voice search work

The groundbreaking part about voice search is the speech recognition technology. Search ability is nothing new and we have been searching the internet for many years. Voice search is powered by the same search engine but by converting voice into text.

The interesting part is that machines can now talk and understand like humans. Human communication is unique on this planet and there are many layers to our communication.

There are so many dialects, nuances and intricacies to our language that we are surprised when a machine answers us correctly just like a human.

Just the tone of ‘everything is fine’ said by a woman can give you an idea that nothing is fine, even though she is saying completely the opposite.

For machines to learn language, various fields of computing, linguistics, mathematics and engineering have had to come together. Machines must pick up on the right sound, convert it into bits and bytes and recognize them as meaningful data. This is done through several processes like

Language modelling -likelihood of certain words following others is used  to improve accuracy

Artificial neural networks – network models that can recognize sound pattern after extensive training

Sound Matching – Simple matching of words based on memory of sounds

Pattern and Feature analysis – where each word is broken down into bits and recognized from its key features like vowels or syllables

Major Players In Voice Search

Major Players In Voice Search

IBM was probably one of the first players to jump into voice recognition and showcased Shoebox, a machine understood up to 16 words, at the 1962 Seattle’s World Fair.

Voice search technology had a breakthrough in 1970 when Lenny Baum invented the ‘The Hidden Markov Modelling (HMM)’ approach to speech recognition. IBM continued to better itself using this model to improve speech recognition of more words.

Microsoft and IBM continued to launch software with voice recognition technology but most of us probably remember Google’s voice search app for iPhone and then Apple’s virtual assistant Siri in 2011.

Today Amazon, Google, IBM, Microsoft and Apple are major players in voice search. Each has its own advantages to play upon. Google has undoubtedly the best search results for Google Assistant while Amazon is a master of customer behaviour and data.

All are competing fiercely to be the market leader in speech and voice recognition market which is estimated to be worth $18.03 billion by 2023. Microsoft is collecting huge amount of data to teach its AI.

They have rented apartments in New York to pick up on sounds and dialects of languages. The idea is to be able to distinguish train noise, traffic and sirens from human voice.

Currently China’s search engine, Baidu, is at the top with 96% word accuracy. Google Now, Apple’s Siri and Microsoft Cortana are close at 95% accuracy.

Amazon Alexa too is almost on the same mark plus it has over 30,000 apps or ‘skills’ with 5000 new skills added every 100 days.

Industry experts are eying the 99% accuracy rate and say that use of voice search will explode at this level. With the current level of research and money that is going into voice recognition technology that time is not far.

Voice search changes everything

Voice search changes everything Voice search changes a lot for businesses. All the rules of advertising, online shopping and digital marketing are going to change for brands.

Advertising and Voice search

Voice search has little to no scope for advertising right now. Even in future customers will likely be annoyed if they hear an ad before getting the result. The visual screen allows marketers to place their ads in various spaces on the screen (banner ads, sidebar, affiliate links etc), but voice medium will not have any such option.

Brands will have to step up their content marketing to be the most helpful answer users are looking for.

Voice Search and Localisation

Mobile voice search are 3x times more likely to be local compared to text search. Hound, a voice query app, noted that more than 22% of information searched fell in the local search category (local restaurants, services, pet shops, ATMs, etc,). This is an opportunity for brick and mortar stores to grab.

Those that optimise for voice search and integrate their delivery channel with online ordering will be able to profit from this technology. We will share more on local voice search optimization in below section.

Voice Search and Buyer’s Journey

Human conversations are very contextual and hence our voice searchs are also going to be same. For example the questions ‘ which is the best speaker’ and ‘ how much is it for?’ are meaningful only when considered together. Without the context of first question the second question will be meaningless.

Virtual assistants also consider data on what apps the user is using and what his browsing history was.  For this reason businesses will have to shift their focus from keywords to customer context. Touching the customer at the right time with the right message on the right device will be of essence.

To be found in voice searches companies will have to understand voice search optimization. Let us look what it is and how brands should optimize best for voice.

What is Voice Search Optimization

voice search optimization

Voice search optimization is practices that make your content to appear in the voice search result. You must be familiar with keyword targeting for SEO, but how do you optimize for voice search?

Honestly, it is too early to answer this question already. We do not know how virtual assistants are picking results and how they will decide which result to voice in future. Google, Apple and IBM are probably figuring out a way themselves.

Google featured snippet and answer box is the search engine’s way to suggest one best answer for users in text search. Google assistant probably uses similar algorithm to pick a result for voice searches.

For now all we can do is study how people are searching by voice and what results Alexa and Siri are voicing.

A study of Voice Searches so Far

A survey of MindMeld found that 40% of users had started using voice in past six months. But what exactly are people searching for?

Voice searches can be broadly categorised into four buckets which are –

Transactional Searches – “Alexa, buy 2 pizza base”

Informational Searches – “ Google, who was the actress in Happy Days?”

Navigational Searches – “Show me comparison of best phones in Amazon” These searches direct you to other apps.

Voice searches also tend to be more of question phrases. We are more likely to ask “How to bake a cake” than say “cake recipe”. Accordingly most of the voice searches start with ‘How to’, ‘When was’, ‘which’, ‘what’, ‘who’ and ‘why’.

Voice searches are also longer with more number of words and long tail keywords. This will help marketers to go niche in their content and target specific needs of users.

Meditative spotlight found out that 89% of people search for local business on their smartphone once a week. This means that local business optimization will work when it comes to voice search. After years of being dominated by big corporations, local businesses will finally have a level playing field to reach their customers.

Since users are looking for quick solutions around them while multi-tasking, mobile voice search is three times more likely to be local based compared to text search.

So far study of voice searches shows that they are long- tailed, specific, local and dominated by question phrases. Let us now look at what you can do as a business to optimize your site and content for voice search.

How to Optimize for Voice Search

How to Optimize for Voice Search

Keep in mind that virtual assistants only give one best answer in voice search. So it’s all about being the relevant answer in different contexts instead of ranking for keywords. It is expected that search engines will consider customer data before suggesting a result. So, the result will not depend on just helpful content but also on user’s location, history and apps he/she is using currently.

Focus on Long Tail Keywords and short, snappy answers

Until now everybody has told you that long form blogs do well. That is about to change with voice search. For transactional and informational queries users will like to listen to a one line answer. For everything that they want to learn on they would prefer visual information in the form of videos or pictures.

Ranking in voice search answer will be about giving one -line answers specific to demographics of the users. It will not be surprising if Google takes in account your business location, customer demographic and site visitor profiles before selecting your answer.

Your optimization for voice search will depend on how well you can understand the user intent and answer it. Use tools like AnswerThePublic to come up with common questions that user can ask on your topic.

Think of all the questions possible about your industry, product or services and answer them in a direct way. This will also make it more likely for you to be at the position 0 or featured snippet in Google.

Even if you do write a long form blog make sure that the answer is at the beginning of the post. You can also mark the main answer in your post so that Google finds it easier to pick. This brings us to the next point.

Schema Markup

http://www.jointviews.com/blog/online-marketing-agency-trivandrum/

Along with content on your page Google also reads your structured data or structured data to understand the relevancy of content. This is HTML tags that go into your site’s source code.

Big search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and Yandex have come together to accept a common language of mark-up data that tells them the relevancy of content.

Because of schema mark-up Google is able to display snippets of search results with image of products, reviews and description arranged all neatly.

Though schema markup does not affect your search ranking directly (according to Google), having your information displayed conveniently does have a huge impact on your click through rate.

Also the information on opening hours, directions and reviews when you search for a local business is all because of schema markup. This is important for voice search because when users find you on searching they want to know directions to the store and opening hours etc.

Listing your business in Google My Business is also a great way to be found in local searches. Additionally optimize your content for your area, ‘near me’ and famous landmarks near your store.

Focus on questions

As mentioned above majority of voice searches are questions that start with how, who, what, when and why. Optimizing for voice search therefore means answering these questions in the most helpful way.

Start with studying all the questions your customers have. You may have already done this for your FAQ section. The next step is to turn these questions into blog posts so that search engines can easily find answers. You could also repurpose your existing content to answer voice search queries better.

Optimize for all Search Engines

Google has more than 90% share in text search. So optimizing for search engine essentially means optimising for Google. However, this is not the case with voice search.

Apple, Amazon and IBM have started on a level ground with Google this time and some are even ahead of Google in certain types of searches.

Therefore it is important to understand how Alexa, Siri and Cortana work with voice searches. For example, Alexa only buys product that are marked with ‘Amazon’s Choice’ badge.

Not much information is available on how other search engines work, but as voice search on these platforms rise experts will analyse what makes results heard in voice search.

Ethical Implications

Before we close the topic there are some fears regarding voice search technology that are being raised by thinkers. Although equally dangerous, these fears are not receiving as much attention as issues in Artificial Intelligence or Data Privacy.

The ethical question is this- are we putting our decision making power in the hands of big corporations? Are we being robbed of options in name of convenience?

The idea of Alexa buying grocery for you is not comforting to everyone. It is possible for big corporations to push their own agenda (of profit), by recommending you a sugar loaded cereal that compromises on your health. This technology is perfect to mask the knowledge we need to hear and just feed us the information that conditions our minds.

Then there’s also the issue of data privacy. To optimize voice search for you, voice assistants will have complete access to what you say, do and buy on all devices. It will be an ever-present character in your life that learns more about you every day.

Tying It All Together

Voice search is going to disrupt how brands have been attracting leads and telling stories. This is not just about ranking in voice search but about changing your customer experience altogether. Users are going to expect 100% accuracy from voice recognition software and ready answers to all their queries.

This does mean however that visual content is going to go away. Visuals will always be important considering the fact that it is the most important medium for us to learn new things and connect with others.

Visual media will probably be dominated by videos and images though. Voice search fits in perfectly where the need is informational or the command is transactional.

Voice search market is still at its nascent stage with big players such as Google, Apple, Microsoft, IBM and Amazon trying to dominate. Only players who perfect their voice recognition and learn from huge amounts of data will become the leader.

As far as impact on businesses is concerned the change is going to be significant. From ad placement to content creation, brands will have to rethink everything they are doing now.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact localization of search and contextual content will level the playing ground between large corporations and local businesses.

To stay relevant and be found by customers, brands must give out the right message at the right time on the right device. This involves answering relevant questions specifically using long tail keywords. Schema markup and local search optimization are also important for voice search optimization.

How to Build a Content Marketing Strategy in 2018

Posted on by NextJSjointviews

How do you know what’s the right content strategy for you in this ever-changing digital marketing world?

Google has come a long way from ranking results which are just stuffed with keyword. Also, many brands have proven that ranking content strategy is not about ranking first on Google.

So many start-ups have been successful with email marketing, social media, video content etc. For example, Leadpages grew its subscriber list from 0 to 15,000 within a year mainly from email marketing and tons of helpful content.

There are numerous ways to create and distribute your content. By the time you start implementing your video marketing plan you hear that influencer marketing is the next big thing.

This is precisely why picking a strategy and sticking with it is difficult for most marketers.

Add to this that most topics and niches are overcrowded by now. You will find brands already ranking with great content no matter what your niche is.

So how do you succeed in this challenging scenario? You have to be up to date and ahead of your competition in content marketing.

This is why we have put together a recipe to build a content marketing strategy that’s perfect for 2018 in this blog. Here is what you need to include in your strategy.

Remember that strategy for each company may be different but these are the basic ingredients that must be there in your content strategy if you want to succeed today.

Write Insanely Helpful Content

How Google ranks results has changed over the years and will keep changing in future too. There is just one way to make sure that you are ranking for years to come in your niche. And that is to write high quality content that answers reader’s questions.

Think of the pain points your customers face in your industry and create content to solve their problems. The content must be twice as helpful as the number one ranking result.

Even if you are not focusing on search engine it is a good practice to benchmark against the best performing content and then surpass it.

If the number one result on Google gives ‘10 helpful ways to increase sales’? Write ‘21 helpful ways’ instead to attract users.

Is the top content unbeatably good? Shoot a simple video to make the same points and embed in your blog. People (especially millenials) prefer to watch information rather than read it.

Remember there is always something you can do to improve the content already out there.

Write Long Form Content

Longer blogs typically perform better. The sweet spot according to most studies is 2000- 2500 words. However, even posts of up to 4000 words are now doing better in many niches.

Since every topic is overcrowded with content, it is now time to go niche in your topic and write in-depth content. In short write to cover more in narrow topic rather than touching on various topics in your industry.

Write for ‘Best women’s trekking shoes for Himalayan treks’ instead of ‘trekking shoes for women’ and cover everything possible under the narrow topic.

This also makes sure you are targeting long form keywords. Also, readers who fall under your narrow target are more likely to subscribe since you answered exactly what they wanted.

Of course it goes without saying that this level of micro-targeting can only be possible if you have done an in-depth research on your target market.

Use Video Content

2017 has seen a huge jump in visual content consumption. Cisco estimates the video content traffic will be 80% of all internet traffic by 2019.

Given that 4x times more users prefer watching a video rather than reading about a product it makes sense to invest your efforts in video. Live streaming on social media is big today. So is infographics and recorded video for helpful content.

Podcast is also gaining momentum since it allows users to multi task or listen when they are driving. So, simply converting your existing content to video or audio could also get you lot of traffic.

Optimize for Mobile

According to Business to Community nearly 80% of Internet usage will be from mobile in 2018!

That is a huge portion which should flip the way you look at device usage. It primarily means that brands should now start building for mobile and then optimize the content for desktop.

Use AMP pages for better mobile experience, make apps and focus getting share of the mobile screen for a winning content marketing strategy in 2018.

Have a Driving Purpose

This is important in an age where the internet is overflowing with similar looking ‘me too’ content. Being original and having a purpose sets you apart to your target market immediately. People connect with brands that have a cause and value that matches their own.

This is evident in case of the younger population. According to AdWeek, 49% of millennial will seek out brands that align with causes. This is more than any other generation.

Let’s Wrap It Up

Going niche is the best strategy to capture audience that is bombarded with unnecessary information all the time. Give your audience something they looking for and in a format they prefer and you are bound to succeed. Writing long form content which is helpful essentially takes care of this.

Focus efforts on video and mobile screen since that is where most of population is consuming content in 2018

 

 

The What, Why and How of Content Marketing:

Posted on by NextJSjointviews

Content marketing is disseminating information to your customers in the form of words, images, infographics, videos, and blogs that eventually translates into building customer engagement, trust and establishing a company’s image without writing any sales pitch. Interesting!!

But there is more to it. Content marketing is not a formula; instead, it is an approach which helps you reach your target customers  by giving them something that adds value to their existing knowledge base and encourages them to buy.

Today, B2B companies are using nearly 30% of their digital marketing budget in content marketing. It has grown as one of the most influential media of communication between companies and their customers.

Why Content Marketing?

Knowing why you are doing content marketing is very important. While creating workflows, assigning responsibilities, and building a content calendar is an essential activity, but knowing the various reasons behind content marketing is pivotal.

Take a step back and look at the big picture, understand whether your brand needs it or not at first place. If the answer is ‘Yes,’ then what will be its ROI? What additional resources do you need to execute the content marketing?

Begin with the end in mind is the key to content marketing, therefore dive deeper and know why your brand needs content marketing. Some of the reasons are enumerated below:

Create Brand Awareness

When you share content in diverse forms with your consumers, it creates an impact on their minds. Content marketing helps you distribute your varied content on different media and establish your brand identity which is very important for the beginners.

Improve SEO and Traffic:

When you are present where you should be, it has an impact on your SEO and Google rankings. When Google ranking increases, it increases the number of visitors landing on your website. More visitors, eventually mean more business and revenue. Therefore, content marketing plays a vital role in improving search engine ranking and bringing traffic.

Enhance Engagement

When you write better content in the form of blogs, videos, infographics, and emails, it turns customer awareness into something more meaningful. A great content pays the way for more customer participation, helps in building a better relationship that can add an individual’s experience with your brand.

Increase Brand Perception

Building brand perception takes time, and it gets created from various sources. Content marketing is one of them. People gradually learn to identify you from your content, its presentation, tone, and style; that helps you in becoming a brand in the eyes of your consumers.

Helps generate leads

Content marketing is a handy tool in generating a lead when you write engaging content on your website or other social media platforms; it encourages your customer to sign-up to know more about your product and services. Therefore, while the objective of content marketing is to attract your customers, it eventually leads to generating more leads.

Increase Sales/Revenue

When you do content marketing in the right manner, it increases sales. The primary objective of content marketing is not only to convert potential leads into customers but also to retain customers and to maintain them as loyal buyers for future. Your content assists your consumers in deciding to purchase.

Become a Thought Leader

When you write enticing content, share your opinions about pertinent topics, you become a trusted resource. People listen to your thoughts and refer your opinion before they make a buying decision. Therefore, content marketing also helps a marketer emerge as a thought leader.

How is Content Marketing done?

There is no one size fits all when it comes to content marketing, different brands and different company sizes pursue different content marketing strategy. While a consistent presence on social media gives expected results to one brand, blogging, and video marketing fits the nature of other business.

Let us dig deeper to understand how content marketing is done:

B2B Content Marketing types:

Webinars

Nothing can substitute the experience of a live webinar when you want to generate qualifying leads. They are scalable and compelling and demonstrate what you want to communicate with your customers. Although expensive, it speaks about the viability of your product and proves to be a powerful tool for companies in B2B marketing.

Blogs

Come what may, the blog remains as one of the most effective and surest ways to deliver your message to your customer. It adds to customer’s knowledge and assists customer buying behavior. B2B marketers can use blogging to their best of their advantage and generate revenue.

Email

Email marketing brings positive value for B2B marketers. Its biggest benefit is not only the way it gets delivered to the customers but also in it being the best tool for nurturing the lead. Crafting regular emails forms an integral part of content marketing and is one of the most dependable strategies too.

Social media:

Undoubtedly the cheapest and the most consistent result producing platform, which is integral to any content marketing effort is social media. When done thoughtfully and with absolute consistency, social media marketing creates results that no other platform offers.

White Papers

White papers are valuable research and data points that give not only information about the business but also elucidates on industry trends, stats, government regulations, etc. In B2B, the white paper holds their importance and should be considered as a critical element for content marketing.

Infographics

When you want to pass on your message to your customer in a quick form without taking much of his time, infographics are a handy tool. It is entertaining and visually appealing, therefore should form a part of any content marketing effort.

Case Studies

Through case studies, a customer is advocating your brand; you are mentioning how you helped his brand in reaching new heights through various marketing efforts. Such case studies engage customers who have the same pain points, and it inspires them to take help from your company. It is a great approach and should form a part of your content marketing strategy.

Check the video below to get an idea about content marketing methodology

 What are the popular B2B Content Marketing tactics?

When you adopt content marketing in your marketing strategy, there are a few tactics which you should know about. Whether you are B2B or B2C, these tactics will make way for your success.

Let us list down the most important ones for you:

Create content that connects with your audience: Everything you create should work towards building your brand and connecting with your customers. The objective should be to reach the target audience and not the largest audience through content marketing.

Deliver value: This is the golden rule, deliver value at every touch point you interact with the customer. Educate, advice, advocate, entertain, inform and inspire your customer at every point to make your content marketing effort fruitful.

While selling, sell tactfully, do not push your customer to buy or load him with a lot of unnecessary information or messages, and don’t just speak for yourself, sell subtly.

Make use of user-generated content: Any content marketing effort is futile if it does not involve the ultimate user. User-generated content is a fantastic way to engage your customers and make them feel valuable.

Different content mix: Do not just stick to one content type, instead create a combination of different content that suits a B2B company and more specifically your brand.

Seek feedback: Feedbacks from your customers help you improve your brand image, therefore make sure that you ask your user to give feedbacks either on your website or through an email.

Optimize and audit your current strategy: When you optimize and monitor your current strategy, you get to know what you were doing wrong or which activity was the most result producing. Therefore, it is an important tactic to monitor and optimize your strategy from time to time.

Plan a distribution strategy: A content distribution strategy is crucial as it brings your content in front of your audience. Therefore, plan a robust and yielding content distribution strategy.

Build relationships: The last but not least content marketing tactic is to focus on building relationships rather than just conversion or revenue. It gives far-reaching results, and building relationship with customers has other notable benefits too.

B2B Content Marketing trends in 2018

The inclusion of Artificial intelligence and virtual reality:

Brands have to embrace AI and VR in their marketing mix else there are all chances that they might lose their customers to their competitors.

Influencer marketing will be on upsurge:

Influencer marketing will move away from the hands of big brands to the smallest level of business; it will spread its wings across all spheres of business.

Original content will top the list:

In 2018 too, nothing will be more important than the creation of original content. The marketer will focus on newer ways to create fresh and unique content to mark their presence.

Personalization and customization will be necessary when marketers will deliver product or service to its consumers in 2018.

Future of B2B Content Marketing:

The future of content marketing is at an all-time high this year and will see a quantum increase in the years to come. A little bit of change in their strategy and marketers will enjoy a host of benefits from their content marketing strategy and will earn more. A few changes that the marketers will have to embrace:

  • More investment and a higher budget
  • Increased use of Search Engine Marketing
  • Explore all social media channels
  • Communication and documentation of strategy

Tying It All Together

Content marketing is a time taking action, it does not produce results overnight. It might take few months to even a year to see the results of a content marketing strategy. However, the effects can be significant, and it can become your most cost-effective marketing channel.

How Much Does It Cost to Make a Promotional Video

Posted on by NextJSjointviews

A promotional video has inherent great worth in it. Those appear genuine as characters in them display real facial expressions and body language.

The dialogue of the characters in the video simply adds meaning and power to the ideas behind the creation of the product. Lending the product a bit of candor, the promotional videos lend credence to the concepts of utilities in the product.

More often than not, promotional videos are most effective in giving detailed product demonstrations. Moreover, the videos have proven their mettle in engaging the attention of the viewers.

As entertainment and educational values are ingrained in them, the videos are great marketing tools.

As the videos are really persuasive, the messages in the products and services stay etched in the minds of the customers forever.

Making a commercial video includes several types of costs.

Let’s make a list of them.

  • Cost of camera
  • Selection of location and cost involved
  • Fees of models or actors
  • Post production costs

Although the above costs would vary from case to case, there are certain factors that influence the costs. Let’s know them one-by-one.

Script and the idea behind it

“Ideation” or generation of an idea is the most important part of making of a promotional video. For this, a creative script writer could literally cast a magic spell through an interesting script. Usually, a good idea leads to compilation of a good script.

A witty script writer simply transforms the idea to an interesting script. A good script writer could charge between 4000 to 10000 rupees. For a commercial video, a good script is the first stepping-stone for making a successful commercial video.

Shooting of the video project

Cost of transportation

This part of the making of the commercial video is the costliest. It has many things that simply add to the piling of the expenses. Let’s begin with the cost of transportation.

The production houses charge 20 to 30 rupees per kilometer. They could even charge a fixed amount for the same.

Cost of camera

The cost of camera with the operator could cost an additional expense of 20,000 to 30,000 rupees in a day. This amount is applicable for a commercial in a national television.

But if the commercial video is being made for a local television or simply for a cable network, the complete all inclusive costs could come to 30,000 rupees.

Cost of additional equipment

Besides the above, the producer would have to incur additional types of costs, such as charges for track and trolley, chains and jibs, and lights etc.

Actors and models & their fees

The popularity of actors and models plays decisive part in the cost of making promotional videos. When the advertiser makes up his mind to hire popular models and actors, it certainly adds to the cost of video. If the budget for the promotional video is less, the producer could opt to hire new faces in the industry.

While the budding actresses or models would, of course, work for the producer for a paltry sum of five or ten thousand rupees, the fees of the established models or actors could come in huge amounts. Nowadays, successful television actors charge whopping amounts for their roles in the videos.

Post-production expenses

Usually, the making of a video goes through three phases, such as pre-production, production, and post-production. Editing matters the most in the aftermath of production.

The video production companies could charge up to 5000 rupees per hour for editing the video.

In some cities in India, the production companies charge 2000 to 3000 rupees for editing the video. In case the producers include motion graphics or animations, the expenses for editing even could go higher.

2D & 3D Promotional videos- a new dimension in product’s marketing

As new technology is breaking ground, 2D & 3D animation technology helps a lot to showcase products in concise and clear way.

As multi-media and video animation services are now going through a boom time, the animated videos could literally bring revolution in products’ marketing.

Moreover, animation videos are literally wonderful to explain products and concepts or ideas in the marketability of services.

To add to it, the videos are fully entertaining and those have the versatility to deliver the messages to the core audience.

No need to hire models, actors, and select location and props-great advantage in cost

The promotional videos made with the help of 2D and 3D technology have great advantages in the cost of its production. Those are as follows;

  • The advertisers could create animated videos by completely adhering it to the brand guidelines.
  • In case of necessity, the advertiser could make such videos without hiring actors and models.
  • As locations and props add great expenses to the making of promotional videos, those are not even necessary, when videos have the applications of 2D and 3D technology.
  • Last but not least, the making of 2D and 3D promotional videos could take place completely through in-house productions.
Other benefits of 2D Animated Video
  • As business houses functions in stiff competition, brand building has now become tougher. Invariably, the business leaders look for means for simple but effective business promotion. A 2D animation video works in a simpler way, establishing a quicker rapport with the customers.
  • The moving objects and characters in the 2D animation video literally work wonders by keeping the viewers engrossed for longer periods.
The power of 3D Animated Video- simply unbelievable
  • The integration of 3d promotional video could integrate an immediate sense of production value as it has proven its mettle for adding a sense of depth and special effects of lighting. With apt movement of camera in 3D technology, the video seems to acquire a new high of professionalism.
  • The 3D animation not only adds dynamic movement to the video but also makes the video clip colorful with varying compositions. As a result, the transitions in the video could easily catch the attention of the viewers and convince them to buy the products and services.

 

How to Avoid Common SEO Errors that Hurt Your Rankings

Posted on by NextJSjointviews

Everyone talks about how you can increase your ranking in Google. But people rarely tell you the mistakes to avoid.

Entrepreneurs usually have to make the mistake to find out what they have to avoid.

In this post we will tell you the most common SEO errors that you must avoid to rank well in Google and other search engines. So let’s get started!

Low word count

Word count indirectly affects your SEO as a value adding post will be at least 500 words long. In fact, posts with word counts between 2000 to 3000 words are ranking at top of Google.

A study by SerpIQ found that word count of around 2500 was ideal.

SEO Errors that Hurt Your Rankings

Word count of below 500 will not do much for your ranking and hence should be avoided. People will not gain much from such a post and low time spent on your page is considered bad signal by Google.

Long Title

Title tags are important for your SEO because they appear as the clickable link in search result and are the first thing a user sees and judges your site on. Long titles that are above 65 characters will exceed display limit and hurt your click-through rate.

An attractive title that fits in the results space is important to rank on first page. The idea is to strike a balance between a long tailed title and the optimal length of 60-65 characters. Use tools such as To The Web to get a snapshot of how your page will appear in Google search results.

Duplication of Content

Duplication of page content confuses web crawlers as to which page they should rank. This also directs your traffic to two different pages and divides your page authority. You can use Google Tag Assistant to check for any duplication.

Also use canonical tags on your pages. They tell Google which pages to rank in case of identical or duplicate content

Missing Description

Description is the content that appears just below your title in search results. It is the second thing that a user reads after your title and hence is important to get them on your page. Pages missing this critical description will hurt your SEO efforts. As pages on your site increases the possibility of missing description also increases.

Use tools like SEO MozPro to check this regularly and update your meta descriptions.

Server Errors

A server error is a response by your server indicating that it is unable to load the page. Too many server errors can pull down your ranking within a matter of hours. This error could be:

Code 500 – internal server erros

Code 503 service unavailable

Both the errors will close access to your site by humans as well as Google crawlers leading to a significant drop in rankings. A study by Search Engine Land found out that ranking for keywords dropped as server errors increase for a site.

SEO Errors that Hurt Your Rankings

Image Courtesy : https://searchengineland.com/super-fresh-google-index-server-errors-rankings-impacts-230975

Insecure Pages

HTTPS is a protocol that allows secure exchange of user data with the site server. Not having a secure page negatively affects SEO. Two of the most common problem with insecure pages seen on the web are-

-Mixed Content, i.e. having both HTTP and HTTPS content on one page

-HTTPS pages linking to insecure HTTP page.

Your page must not have any insecure content or link to any insecure resource.

Low Quality Links

You must be aware that the quality of link that point to your site affect your ranking. But did you know that the sites you point to are also important. Linking to spammy websites and insecure pages will negatively affect your rankings. Therefore be sure to link to sites with good reputation and domain authority.

Loading Speed

Loading speed directly affects your SEO metrics. Every fraction of second is crucial when it comes to page loading.  You can take some measures to decrease your page load time if it is more than 1.5 seconds. Consider browser caching, faster server response time, compressing images and content for faster site experience.