Video marketing

Rocking retro at Renew

Video Marketing

Video marketing is becoming a very popular means of reaching and appealing to customers. First of all, the statistics speak for themselves. YouTube now enjoy over one billion users worldwide. Nearly 60% of all digital impressions are being driven by visual content. A picture, as they say paints a thousand words.

Customers enjoy being able to make decisions based on what they can see for themselves. Visual content is more real, transparent and likely to inspire trust in a product than audio or written descriptions alone. Video enables people to make an instant decision whether to buy or to move on. Therefore Video holds significant marketing power. Video marketing helps companies to sell more.

In an interview with The Huffington Post, Michael Litt, CEO of Vidyard, drilled down into why certain videos have more impact than others. According to Litt ‘the best sellers are the ones that challenge the customer to think differently and educate them as trusted advisors’.

‘the best sellers are the ones that challenge the customer to think differently and educate them as trusted advisors’. Michael Litt, CEO of Vidyard

This is the Renew Marketing approach to creating stand-out content to attract customers to your business.

Video Marketing the Renew Marketing Way

As you heard in the Back To Basic video, our emphasis is on understanding your business and your needs. Getting straight to the core of your requirements. We will help develop a concise, consistent, coordinated marketing approach. In conclusion the approach synonymous with getting you the best results may not be the one you initially had in mind. Therefore the ability to both educate and inspire on our part is paramount. Back to Basic is one example of how we achieve this. Rest assured, we dedicate ourselves to developing content that is different. Most of all we want your content to stand out every time.

The Next Step For Your Video Marketing

To talk to us further about your video marketing needs, call us on 0345 0940522

Does Social Media improve your Search Ranking?

Does Social Media Improve Your Search Ranking

Whether you like it or not, the days of SEO only being about relevant keywords are a thing of the past. A common question from our customers is does social media improve your search ranking

Google has found a different way to measure the popularity of your website – social media.

The world’s most popular search engine now uses social signals to tell them what’s popular. The more shares, +1s and re-tweets you get, the higher your SEO ranking. So does social media improve your search ranking, it does now.

[typography font=”Quattrocento Sans” size=”24″ size_format=”px”]Improve your social efforts; help with that all important search engine ranking – Some tips.[/typography]

Content

[typography font=”Quattrocento Sans” size=”16″ size_format=”px”]Get your content right – It’s not all about you.  [/typography]

Do – Get inside your potential customer’s mind. What might interest them, what useful information might they want to read about? Think beyond what your company offers. It’s OK for your content to have nothing to do with your product, you’re trying to encourage users to engage with you. Don’t – talk about yourselves and start talking about your customers. If you want people to share your content this is one piece of advice that’s important to take on board.

[typography font=”Quattrocento Sans” size=”16″ size_format=”px”]Write how you speak  [/typography]

Do – Try writing as you speak, as this is how people search. Interesting, free flowing content is also much more likely to attract social interaction.

Don’t – Bother with boring, keyword stuffed content. Google is smart and will be able to tell that your content is all just keywords & they won’t bother ranking it!

[typography font=”Quattrocento Sans” size=”16″ size_format=”px”]Make Sharing Easy [/typography]

Do -. Always include social icons on all your content to allow users to share your stories with the click of a button Don’t – Get obsessed about how many likes you get for your posts. The shares and re-tweets are what count most. Social sharing is the new word of mouth marketing – and we all know how valuable that is for a brand.

Images And Image Based Social Media

[typography font=”Quattrocento Sans” size=”16″ size_format=”px”]Don’t overlook the use of images  [/typography]

Do – Use Images to add depth to your content. Images allow you an opportunity to extend your message’s reach. Make the most of image specific searches. Don’t – Be too wordy. Remember that most people these days engage on their smart phones or tablets. Smaller screens mean scrolling, your user’s attention will be easier to hold if you keep it short and sweet.

[typography font=”Quattrocento Sans” size=”16″ size_format=”px”]Review your Performance – Plot a Trend[/typography]

Do – Record your results. Look at what works, spot trends and focus on how to make this even better. Don’t – Post at the wrong times. Example – Vodka companies will have greater success posting on Friday afternoon than on Monday morning.

Remember, receiving likes for each post is great. However the thing gets you up those search rankings is shares and re-tweets.

Bedford Marketing Agency

Setting up a Bedford Marketing Agency

From an early age the ambition was to set up a Bedford marketing agency. I was always interested in artwork and design as a youngster and my father said to me while I was at school “you’ll never make money as an artist”. Whether that’s what he meant or he wanted more for the investment he’d made in school fees I’m not sure. This sparked even more of an interest for me though. I’m not someone who gives in easily and generating an income from the thing I love most became my principal objective. So from the age of around 15 I knew my Bedford marketing agency was how I’d get the career I wanted.

Moving my Bedford marketing agency into an office

In 2012, the time came to set up Renew Marketing, my Bedford Marketing Agency. Initially I was working from home with a handful of clients and the business grew pretty swiftly. In December 2015, we had outgrown the conservatory at home and needed premises. The company was moved into serviced offices on the Elms Farm Industrial Estate and that’s where we’ve been since.

Not only do I get to cycle to work, which I love as I’m also a cycling coach, but we have a beautiful clean office from which we can service our marketing clients. Being only a couple of miles from home avoids any traffic issues and enables a quick trip home at lunch time or any other time if needs be.

Moving the company into our Bedford office was one of the best decisions I’ve taken for the company. Not only can we now entertain client visits but it also makes my home my home. When you work hard it’s important to be able to have the choice about separating work and leisure. The alternative can lead to a distinct blurring of lines which can affect both sides of life.

So, if you’re looking for a Bedford marketing agency and want to receive practical advice and solutions, get in touch, we’d love to hear from you. The approach we take is about using evidence and being measurable. For most company owners and marketers this will be music to your ears. No fluff, no fuss, no nonsense. We aren’t about big ideas, quite the opposite, this Bedford marketing agency is about evidence based measurable marketing. Let’s face it, most people want to know how well their investments are performing.

[su_rm_boilerplate_with_image boilerhead=”Contact us now.” boilerimage=”http://www.renewmarketing.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/rm-slider-073.jpg” boilertext=”Get in touch straight away, we’d love to hear from you.” buttonlink=”http://www.renewmarketing.co.uk/contact/” boilerbutton=”CONTACT PAGE”]63% of survey respondents indicate that the ability to set measurable objectives for each of their campaigns is the biggest value driver of marketing automation.[/su_rm_boilerplate_with_image]

5 reasons why to use film in your marketing campaigns

Reasons you should use film in marketing campaigns are clear.

It has long been recognised that film and video are an excellent way to engage consumers. Our appetite globally for tv and moving picture through film and YouTube is staggering. Every marketer would love to be the driving force behind the ad campaign that everyone recognises world over.

What is overwhelmingly apparent in our world of today is that the ‘recipe’ for a global viral hit is not necessarily the same as you would have specified ten years ago. There are, as with any creative success, some guidelines and parameters which make the end result more likely to succeed. To coin a Stephen R. Covey phrase ‘start with the end in mind’. In simple terms, what is it what video / film can do for you and your business?

Here are 5 benefits of using film in marketing campaigns.

1. Get your point across quickly

The stats on how much quicker people absorb information from film are staggering. People have an appetite for fast information, everyone is busy, no one wants to wait too long for anything. Film enables you to quench this thirst, to tell a story and to deliver your message in the shortest possible time.

2. Leverage context

The context of the information you are sharing is important to the relevance to the viewer. Moving picture enables you to set context visually and aurally without relying so heavily on understanding, translation and imagination. Film makes it easier for you. To show the viewer that your message relates to them.

3. Stimulate emotion

Most, if not all, successful campaigns, films, books and music strike an emotive chord within people. The basic nature of film enables you to create suspense, drama, aspiration and many other emotions which you wish to associate with your product or brand. People buy because they are made to feel a certain way. Using film enables you to enhance that emotion in ways other media cannot.

4. Heighten engagement

Trying to pull the kids away from the TV is the easiest analogy to describe engagement brought about by film. Lifting ones head away from an engrossing book or magazine article is fairly easy by comparison. You can mark where you left off with the simple positioning of a thumb or finger, react to whatever has stimulated you and then revert back. Film’s different. Yes you can hit pause but you’re unlikely to do that in the middle of a scene. There’s a fear that you might miss something. Using film enables you to increase that engagement with your target audience.

5. Increase ‘share power’

Social media has brought about ‘likes’ and ‘shares’. Not only are these measures of the stickiness of your content but now they also affect your rank on search engines. You only need to look at your Facebook feed or which virals have been most successful to realise film is an intrinsic part of virality. It is also evidenced that film embedded into email marketing significantly increases click through rates.

Summary

It’s clear that video/film is an essential part of today’s marketing mix. What is less clear is how you should apportion budgets. We would recommend that you make as much budget as is physically available for film. Without it, your message and brand will get lost in the vast stocks of content available at the click of a button. Without film, you just won’t be as memorable as those who do use it. There’s a further point too.

If you are using or intend to use film in your marketing campaigns, you need to ensure the quality is reflective of the quality of your brand. Viewers will make judgements, both consciously and sub-consciously, about your products and brand based on the quality of your film. Put back those marginal improvements on other areas of your marketing mix and invest your budget in video. Do it right and you’ll never look back.

By Ryan Mullins

3 tips to choosing the right film production company

Choosing the right film production company can be challenging.

With film now being so popular as a marketing resource, there’s a mass influx of professional film production companies. Determining which film production companies are professionals and which ones simply call themselves professionals may not be the easiest so here are some tips to help you avoid costly lessons.

Film is one of those areas of marketing, even more so if you are new to it, that it is essential to choose the right company to work with. Professional filming doesn’t come cheap and the last thing you would want is buyer’s remorse from simply not going through the correct selection criteria.

When choosing any new supplier, you want to ensure that their criteria matches yours. It’s important for a number of reasons, probably the greatest being the synergy of expectations and results as you move forward.

Let’s face it, if you’ve decided film is the way forward for you, you want to make every penny count! That’s why all of the top brands of the world invest so much into it. When executed well, it just works.

Here are 3 things to evaluate when you’re choosing your film production company.

1. Heritage

You need to know that the supplier you choose can (and more importantly will) deliver. It would be wise to look for a company / team who have invested the man hours to have all the necessary experience. Malcolm Gladwell cites 10,000 hours as being the yard stick by which to measure peoples’ level of expertise. Once past 10,000 hrs they can be categorised as ‘expert’.

2. Value

Ensuring that you gain value from your production company means that they should be taking a very keen interest in your needs. It may be that your budget and expectations are mis-aligned but a brilliant production company will not only talk you through this but they’ll also discuss with you how you will be able to make your budget work all be it if it’s not the Spielbergesque feature film you had first imagined.

3. Professionalism

Before you’ve worked with a company, you may think it difficult to measure their professionalism but there are a number of ways you can check their credentials in this vital aspect of your decision making process. The first thing you can do is speak with their existing customers. A good company will always have happy customers who are pleased to speak with you. You should perhaps think about asking them about things that have gone wrong and how they’ve been resolved. Accidents do happen and in actual fact, how a company deals with these mini crises is a very good measure of their overall professionalism. You should also ask to see risk assessments and method statements. If these aren’t present, this is a very clear warning signal. Finally, how comprehensive is their insurance? You need to know that all the liabilities are covered and no-one, particularly you, will end up out of pocket as a result of some unforeseen circumstance.

In summary

The hand held domestic video footage of baby biting other baby’s fingers is not the future of video on-line.

Many of the top brands have come to the realisation that if they have a clear enough “call to action” to drive enough traffic to their web-site, those brands are now able to consider themselves in the same way as a genuine TV channel. But this position carries responsibility. Your “viewers” have expectations about the quality of the video they watch on-line, and if other competitors have video on their site at genuine TV quality, they will expect the same from you.

With the BBC’s iPlayer and other on-demand broadcast domains, the consumer can now watch the same TV quality via a digital source as they expect via their satellite dish or digital aerial. So your on-line offering needs to be produced at that TV standard, and the quality must be conveyed through to the viewer by maximising playback and data rates, which are still considered a “black-art” by some, but not by our chosen partner.

The camera’s, lights and all the other kit plus operators MUST be the best, not kids just out of film school with a handy-cam coupled with a cheap piece of plastic on the front masquerading as a lens and then some basic software to edit on. The director needs to be able to write a script, if called for, so the edit has depth and tells a story. That’s how you elevate a basic edit into a short film. The producer and the director need a proper TV background and plenty of practical familiarity and experience, not just cutting the family’s holiday video’s. And for those clients who do not have any professional TV or video production experience it can be extremely hard to ascertain who out there is experienced and will bring gold standards to the table, and those that have only the basis of an understanding of how to make a strong, striking and effective film.

Choosing the right film production company is imperative to maintain control over your costs and satisfy the quality needs of your company.

By Ryan Mullins