Know Your Strengths

No matter what industry you are in, you have to understand your strengths in order to build yourself up as a leader. Take the time to consider why you and your company is the one to purchase goods or services from. When you identify the specific reasons you are business, you are going to be more attractive to potential customers. You only have one chance to make your first impression, and you want potential clients to become engaged with your website the first time they visit.

Content That Matters

There’s a big difference between content on your website that is stuffed full of poorly worded keyword phrases, and content that matters to your audience. Content should be informative, useful, and get your audience thinking. When you offer a new perspective, you are going to stand out from the rest of your competition. Invest in high-quality writing if you don’t have the skill yourself. Create infographics, videos, and use images to supplement the pages you write.

Focus On Social Media

Any business that exists today is losing out if they don’t focus on social media. Most potential customers today use some form of social media to talk with friends and to get recommendations on local businesses. You can try a variety of platforms, and learn where your customer base is hanging out. Learn how to use the functions of each platform you want to build a following on, and consider boosting posts by paying for advertising. Build up your followers on social media, and you will have an automatic audience for any new content you create for your website.

Keep Your Content Updated

Content on a website goes stale fast. In order to remain competitive, you must constantly update your website. Most businesses create stagnant pages for the goods or services offered, but then have a blog that is updated several times a week. You can provide new industry information on your blog, discuss reasons people buy your products or services, or talk about anything that is related to your industry.

Your marketing matters. Pay attention to the content you create and look for ways to engage your audience. Understand why you are an industry leader and look for ways to show your knowledge. Keep your content fresh, and interact with customers on social media.

The post Set Yourself Up as an Industry Leader With a Solid Marketing Strategy appeared first on Saxon Marketing.

This intersection of time-old marketing know-how and modern technology has created a unique goal for sales professionals today: evoking and leveraging customer emotion through video. Whether you’re creating an overt advertisement designed to tug on the heartstrings or you’re crafting an evocative deep-dive behind the scenes of your brand’s missions, values, and day-to-day operations, there are plenty of ways to appeal to customers’ emotional sides.

The Value of Emotion in Marketing  

Throughout the past decade, researchers have begun funneling time and effort into determining how customer emotions impact both the buyer and sales experiences. Appealing to emotion is a critical aspect of successful branding, which helps create an emotional connection to one company. This separates that company from its competitors and fosters brand loyalty over time.

Customers who have a positive emotional association with a brand are:

– 8.4 times as likely to trust the company
– 7.1 times as likely to make larger purchases
– 6.6 times as likely to forgive that brand’s mistakes

In the era of viral videos and advertisements, creating emotional video marketing is especially important. You significantly up your chances of your company’s video marketing materials being shared if you work to appeal to emotions. The virality of your advertisements is heavily dependent on how effective they are at evoking an emotional response.

Four Tips for Creating Videos That Evoke an Emotional Response   

Take the time to learn your customers’ emotions
Figuring out what makes your customers tick is the first step to creating video content that’ll compel them to act. This will be infinitely easier if your own brand’s message and storytelling efforts are clear and concise; if you know who you’re speaking to, it’s much easier to tailor your message to them.

– If your customers want to stand apart from the crowd, create videos designed to help them feel special and cultivate a unique sense of identity
– If your customers are on the hunt for confidence going into the future, craft video marketing that helps them build positive mental pictures of what’s to come
– If your customers seek a sense of security, focus on building up a bank of videos that increases their confidence– what’s here today will be here tomorrow

Know your promotion platform and tailor your content accordingly
Will your video appear as an advertisement before another YouTube video? Will it live on your company’s website? How will customers access it?

These are critical questions to ask yourself before setting out to create an emotionally-evocative video. The creation process will look much different for an overt advertisement than for a piece of artistic business storytelling. YouTube advertisements can generally be skipped five seconds in– you’ll have to work harder to make those five seconds count than you would if you were posting content to social media.

Don’t make a commercial
Marketing is marketing, but there’s something about blatant advertisements and commercials that makes it difficult to feel like a company’s message is genuine. Try to shift the focus away from brand exposure and focus more on telling a story that’s compelling and stirs emotion. Opt to keep anything too brand-centric towards the end of the video.

Rely on first-person narratives
Harnessing the power of storytelling in the first person can make all the difference in your efforts to stir up customers’ emotional response. We’re much more likely to become emotionally invested in a story that we feel we’re a part of.

This doesn’t mean that you should literally be telling a story as it’d be told in a book– you don’t even have to use terminology that directly refers to viewers. Creating marketing videos that tap into customer emotion is as simple as presenting them with content that places them as close to the driver’s seat of what’s happening as possible.

Pitfalls to Avoid

Failing to optimize content
Whether you’ve overlooked the downsides and upswings to the platform you’re delivering content on or you’ve failed to address differences amongst your audience members, failing to optimize content will be your marketing downfall.

Spend ample time ahead of creating your content (let alone posting it) to flesh out all of these details. Think you’ve considered every factor? Sure you couldn’t possibly create content that’s any better targeted? Think again. There’s virtually always something that you can improve or better account for.

Misunderstanding variances in emotional motivators
Emotional motivators can and do vary significantly from person to person– this is a fact that most of us understand, and it’s not something that can be worked around or avoided; but have you considered that entire segments of customers have separate emotional motivators from one another?

Even if you’re offering the same product or service to anybody, the way that product or service impacts senior customers could vary widely from how it does millennials. You could also be marketing to people in various industries– those in construction will be emotionally motivated by different things than people who work with disadvantaged youth or rescue animals.

Focusing on the wrong emotions
Some emotions are known to be more effective to target during the content creation process. Opt for the ones that create urgency, excitement, empathy or deepen a customer’s desire to solve a problem. Emotions like these create vulnerability, which allows your audience to deepen their sense of camaraderie and trust with your brand and its message.

Some ideal emotions to target include:

– Surprise
– Fear
– Frustration
– Anticipation
– Hope
– Sympathy

Working to appeal to consumer emotions can feel like uncharted territory; the process of building video content that effortlessly speaks to a customer’s emotional side seems like guesswork. Fortunately, research has afforded us a tremendous deal of insight into how best to play to our audience’s emotions and create effective, compelling marketing materials.

The post Tapping Into Customer Emotion With Video appeared first on Saxon Marketing.