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DaBrian Marketing’s New Year’s Resolution For 2017

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With a new year comes new and exciting opportunities. At DaBrian Marketing, we’re committed to constantly improving our internal efficiencies, as well as your business’ digital marketing efforts. This year we asked members of our team (including the furry ones ?):

What’s your professional New Year’s resolution?

 

“Get my certification in Quickbooks. Help contribute to the efficiency overall at DaBrian Marketing Group.”

“Simplify and improve the efficiency of meetings to allocate more time to take actions!”

“Learn basic Java Script for PPC Automated Scripting and achieve Bing Partners status for DaBrian Marketing Group”

“Dominate the local market through various Local SEO methods, especially local link building/earning. Improve both our’s and our client’s video marketing efforts. Continue to obtain certifications and accomplishments related to SEO.”

“Earn three or more additional social media/inbound marketing certifications. Stay knowledgeable with the latest trends for social media, email, and video marketing. Find the best possible opportunities for each of our clients and DaBrian Marketing to get the most exposure on their social media platforms. I want to see our efforts go viral!”

“Explore new possible methods and strategies to help further improve our efficiencies as an agency, and the communication amongst clients.”

“Continue to develop my skills in graphic design and web coding.”

“Expand my education in HTML, HTML5, PHP, Javascript and responsive web design as a whole. Help our team become more efficient with client & internal processes. Also, being more involved in blogging and social media.”

“Finally catch my tail.”

“Be a better boy.”

“Expand the reach and visibility of the company & service offering while consistently differentiating us from the competition.”

What’s your New Year’s resolution for 2017? Tell us in the comments below!

Top 5 Video Marketing Tips

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As video searches continue to increase, video marketing is becoming even more essential for a business to have an effective digital marketing campaign. In fact, a report by Marketing Land states that videos make up 62% of all Google searches. To ensure that your video performs well, here are 5 video marketing tips.

1. Video Marketing 101: Make Videos People Want to Watch

Although it appears that marketing and SEO are constantly evolving, one factor has stayed consistent, content is king. This holds true for video marketing as well. While all videos are different, they should all share the same goal of receiving sustained traffic and user engagement. To assure your video performs well, it needs to be engaging, informative, entertaining, and most importantly, shareable. In terms of how long the video should be, this differs based on the intention and audience of the video. With that being said, most viewers’ attention spans are relatively short. Get your message across concisely in the most efficient manner possible, and your video will do great.

2. Select Relevant and Obtainable Keywords

Before you upload your video it’s essential that you develop a list of relevant keywords to ensure your video is optimized. Ideally, your keywords should adhere to the three following recommendations:

  • Look for keywords that aren’t too difficult to rank for (or else you’ll never rank well). Choose long tail keywords (phrases typically 3-4 words) to help reduce the difficulty. This will allow you allow you to specifically target a particular audience. A great (free) tool for this is Keyword Finder.
  • Select keywords that are generating interest (or else no one will search for your video). A great (also free) resource for this is Google Trends. Just type in different synonyms and variations of your keywords, and see which ones perform the best.
  • The intent of the keywords should directly correlate with the content of your video. For example, if your keyword phrase is “Change a car tire,” your video shouldn’t be about how to fix your windshield or change your oil. Keep it it relevant.

3. Optimize Tags, Titles, and Descriptions

After you’ve composed your keyword list, you’ll need to place them within the appropriate places. The three major areas for optimization are the tags, titles and descriptions (as seen in the image below).

Video Marketing Tips

The title should contain your primary keyword phrase (the one you wish to rank for) and should be descriptive as to what your video is about. In terms of the description, YouTube allows video descriptions to be up to 5000 characters long. I would recommend that you use most, if not all of it. While most users are not going to read your entire description, the more keywords you naturally place within your description, the better chance you’ll have to rank for them.

Tags are individual keywords that describe your video. Similar to your keywords, make sure your tags are relevant to the content of your video. The goal of optimization is to drive the right traffic to your video. If you choose tags for the intention of visibility and not relativity, then your video will more than likely receive an influx of dislikes and lower retention rates. Thus, having a negative impact on your rankings.

4. Add Closed Captioning

Since your video is not text based, search engines have a hard time indexing it. Providing YouTube with closed captioning gives them another source of information that contains the keywords you wish to rank for. Here’s a video tutorial on how to upload your transcript to YouTube to create closed captioning.

5. Encourage User Engagement

User engagement is a huge ranking factor for YouTube. So how do you get viewers to engage? Try asking. Create a call to action at the end of your video, asking people to like, comment, share, and subscribe. With that being said, be aware that YouTube is full of trolls (people negatively spam commenting on your video). The good news is that YouTube allows you to moderate your comment section. That not only means you should delete the spam comments whenever possible, but you should also reply to comments as well. This two way engagement will help build a relationship with your viewers that will more likely cause them and others to comment more often knowing you’re actually acknowledging them.

For more information about video marketing, contact us or leave us a comment below!

By: David McDowell

How to Fail at Video Marketing

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So, You Want to Start Making Videos

As a marketing medium, video is great. Really great. Think about it—in less than 90 seconds, it’s possible to captivate your audience, bring them to the brink of tears, or even turn them into your next customers. As a marketer, browsing your favorite brands on YouTube can quickly make you feel like your own marketing mix is missing something.

Whether you’re working toward brand differentiation:

Highlighting your latest product or service:

Or better yet, showing your commitment to helping others:

How can your team possibly manage to produce video content like this? Today, that dream becomes a reality. We’re not going to show you what you should be doing, but precisely the pitfalls to avoid. Let’s get started.

1. You Don’t Have a Plan

It’s really easy to rush into video thinking that all the pieces will simply fall into their proper places. Production timelines? Animation requirements? Let’s table those, we’ve got editing software suites and fancy cameras to buy!

Trust us when we say, video is like any other marketing tactic. It requires proper planning, tactful execution, and measurement components to be truly successful. Because video can incorporate so much of your company (your brand identity, your value proposition, your website or other linked assets, etc.), there’s no reason a strategy shouldn’t be priority numero uno.

To begin, start with some goals and objectives that you hope to achieve using video, whether you’re looking for greater brand awareness from a younger demographic or increased social media engagement and sharing. Then, take those goals and decide the best ways to measure them accurately and consistently. Will you define “brand awareness” by the number of viewers that watch your video all the way through, or the users that respond to your call to action asking them to subscribe for more info?

These, my friend, are the elements and processes to include in your video marketing measurement plan and strategy.

2. You’re Stuck Thinking Inside the Box

Conceptually, video is a perfect way to highlight key areas of your brand, but also venture into uncharted waters. What many businesses find, though, is that they limit themselves in the creative process. Take note of this very important idea—it’s better to create one video that tries something new than create three that bore your viewers for the sake of playing it safe. In the digital space, it always pays to test, experiment, learn, and improve upon your tactics.

And so long as you’ve got clear measurements of success, you’ll be able to gauge which elements work, which were less effective, and where additional opportunities lie for the next go around. Here’s a quick example:

Let’s say you’ve spearheaded a production that gives your viewers an “inside look” at how your product is built, from the factory to the end user. Once complete, you notice that some measurements are off the charts, like viewer retention and social media shares, but others are lower than you’d like—such as referral traffic and user comments. Your next video can improve upon the last one by asking users to share their story or offering some incentive for leaving their comment.

The point is, there’s no reason you shouldn’t change up your process based on available data.

3. You Film Too Much (or Not Enough)

Now, to the content itself. Here you have to make a very important choice, and that’s precisely the type of footage or style(s) of video that consistently represents your brand and its message. Per-production project briefs are a great idea here, as they allow you to decide exactly what to shoot and what is unnecessary based upon the video’s overall goal. Some other important items to cover in a video project brief include:

  • The audience segment(s) you hope to target
  • The key takeaway(s) or value to a viewer
  • Other required assets (music, text, images, etc.)
  • Transitions and/or fades
  • Start/end screen text (i.e. your call to action)

With this information in hand, you can ensure your entire team can remain on the same page regarding the general vision for each production. As you start shooting, the brief will guide the process, meaning you don’t waste precious time on location or shooting sequences that might not make it into the finalized piece (even if it seemed like a good idea at the time).

On the flip side, there’s the problem of shooting a single piece of footage for an entire production and calling it quits. Unless the video falls into the category of a “recorded webinar” or “presentation,” aim to include at least 3-5 other assets throughout. As an example, if the focus of the video is an interview with a highly-acclaimed chef opening a new restaurant, additional BRoll can include clips of dishes being prepared or photos of the restaurant’s construction. BRoll refers to any secondary content that lends additional meaning to a primary sequence.

4. Your Reach Exceeds Your Grasp

I know, I know. We just talked about not succumbing to creative limitations, but this holds true as well. Jumping into video marketing without assessing what is and isn’t possible is the start of a slippery slope. One that leads to your team spending precious time and effort trying to meet your overzealous expectations. If you’ve got a crew of two in charge of all video production, from planning, to editing, to promotion, you may find that quarterly videos are more feasible than monthly.

One way to combat a lack of resources but keep the creative juices flowing is to explore “microcontent” video platforms, such as Vine or Instagram. Of course, keeping this process adaptable, focused, and brand-consistent is still vital. As an example, your local law firm probably shouldn’t be posting #TBT pics or selfies. Remember that even though these productions are often smaller and more spontaneous, it’s still an entire brand you’re representing. Save the LOL pics for when you’re off the clock.

Are you ready to take the plunge into video? Grab your water-wings and share your experience in the comments!