How video enhances the creativity for engineering marketing

The American author and renowned management consultant, Peter Drucker, once proclaimed that since the only real aim of a business is to create and keep customers, then all businesses could be seen as having only two basic functions; marketing and innovation. ‘Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs,’ he went on to conclude. Whether you agree with Drucker or not, his point highlights that often difficult relationships are found in engineering and technology companies between marketing departments and R&D. Engineers must develop products the market wants, and marketers must communicate complex products to customers effectively. When the product or system being engineered is highly complex or diffuse in nature and your target audience is not necessarily well versed in the technical language of your industry, a bridge is needed to create a connection between consumer and product. Engineering firms…

Part 3 in a series showing how Big Data can support marketing

In my previous article in this series exploring the application of Big Data to marketing, I looked at how the Volume component of Big Data provides breadth and depth to your understanding of your customers. In this post, I will explore the second of the 3 Vs, the potential impact of Velocity on Marketing.

Let’s first look at what we mean by Velocity and put down a simple definition of ‘Velocity is the speed of data growth/change’.

In the last few years, the accumulation of data has grown at an astonishing rate, with the amount of data increasing by 2.5 exabytes each day or 40% annually at current rates and accelerating.

The big question is, what does velocity mean for businesses looking to tap into it and does this speed of growth/change…

Continuing our briefing on how to apply Big Data for Marketing

In the first post in this short series I gave an introduction to using Big Data for marketing.  That introductory post included an overview of the concept and looked at the three core elements Volume, Velocity and Variety. In this second post in the series, I will look at the impact of the increase volumes of data associated with Big Data - what does this mean in practice for real-world marketing? Of the 3 V’s, Volume is the easiest to relate to Big Data, as it is about the amount of data, which as of 2012 stood at ~2.5 zettabytes and is expected to grow to almost 7.9 zettabytes by 2015. It is however a controversial area with many differing opinions on what constitutes ‘big volume’. To my 5 year…

Plus 4 examples of videos aligned with business goals

We find that many of our B2B clients have a lack of confidence about their businesses suitability to video (or should that be the other way around?). They think that in order for a product to work in a video it needs to be entertaining in itself. But that is just not true - there are plenty of stories behind every business that are best communicated using video. In many cases it is often easier with B2B as the target customer is often more clearly defined and understood. What is more complicated with B2B video is that marketers need to work harder to convince a number of decision makers in an organisation. Here is an example of how we used 2 short videos to increase a B2B clients website by 10% - it only took 1 month to achieve this…

Big Data, Big Analytics, Big Automation, Big Noise?

When I first started my career, storage was not at today’s inexpensive levels and one of the big challenges was utilising the space available in efficient an ingenious ways. Over the years the price has plummeted with space becoming freely available and available data growing exponentially. In recent years the ability to use this data has become possible with development of Big Data removing the historic problems of storage and access in reasonable, practical timescales. But what does this storage potential mean for marketers? Is it just more data? Many I speak to are wondering about the applications and this is also suggested by Dave Chaffey's review of Online marketing trends for 2014 where Big Data was voted as having the third biggest commercial potential for Smart Insights readers. In this post and a short series, I'll be exploring how the increase of available, ever…

Our entire 68-point workflow for setting up and presenting a successful webinar

Do you use webinars and want to make them more effective, or are you considering using them for the first time in 2014? In this post I'll share what we have found works for us, grouped into 11 steps. What you’ll get in this blog post: Three reasons why we host webinars—and why you probably should too. Some great technology that will hugely improve the quality of your webinars. Proven templates for all the documents you’ll need to create (emails, blog posts, etc.). Pre-webinar tasks you must complete before you start. Some easy-to-make embarrassing webinar blunders we’ve made, and how you can avoid them. How to edit the slides and video and post them to your blog.

Why you should consider hosting webinars

Webinars are highly effective for communicating with your target market. In fact, this year we have experimented with turning down almost every conference speaking request…

Interactive video encouraging direct response

Episode 1, Scene 1. Boardroom meeting, charts showing sales figures on the up, 3 people sit around the boardroom table.

You can cut the tension with a knife...

Financial Director: 'OK, so what's the plan?'Marketing Director: 'We're going to create an online video campaign, everyone's doing it, we're going to do it better, it's going viral.'CEO: 'I'm sorry?'MD: 'We're going to get loads of views, people will feel really warm to our brand and they will buy from our company like never before.'FD: 'Can we measure that?'MD: 'Erm, not really.'FD: 'Does the sales team get leads?'MD: 'No but that's not the point, it will bring people to us, inbound mar…'CEO: 'You're fired.'Marketing Director faintsCut.

Video - the conundrum

Though there are signs that belts are loosening and that companies are investing in creativity, when communicating with their audience. However, one of the biggest challenges faced by the marketing dept is…

Google Helpouts are the latest in a long line of services from Answers through Knol

From when Google Search launched in 1997, Google has always been trying to find the best answers to its users' queries. Google Helpouts are the latest approach to help answer users queries, but in a quite different way to standard search. Did you know that Google briefly tried a similar approach before? In order to provide a more dedicated response to users' queries, in Aug 2001 Google decided to launch 'Google Questions and Answers'. This service allowed users to send their questions by email and for a flat fee of US $3 Google staffers would reply to those questions. Unfortunately the Google service ran for only 24 hours, after which it was shut down due to excessive demand! This was followed by 'Google Answers' in April 2002. This  was different in the…

5 examples of how brands are using Snapchat to engage younger audiences

Have you heard of the photo messaging service Snapchat? You likely will have if you're a teenager or watch how teenagers use their smartphones. But if not, you may not have heard of it, since it's just 2 years since it launched. But it's definitely one to watch, if your brand needs to keep up with the social media engagement of the youth audience. These statistics on the popularity and potential of Snapchat speak for themselves:

350 million snaps per day shared via Snapchat (on a par with Facebook daily uploads)

Valuation of $3.6 billion sought (on a par with Pinterest)

9 percent of all call phone users in the US now use Snapchat according to Pew, which compares to 18% for Instagram

Facebook recently trying to…

Who are your audience on YouTube and what turns them on or off?

For any serious video content creator, YouTube Analytics (YTA) is an essential tool. Using YTA regularly is the only way to assess the performance of your YouTube channel and to see any significant changes or patterns in your audiences’ behaviour. The insights that YTA provides are designed to highlight to creators what they need to do to make better videos. If you are approaching your video output strategically, YTA is your means to regularly assessing the performance of your videos and using those insights to constantly improve your content and audience strategies.

This is an introduction to the main features of YouTube Analytics. The guide is divided into two sections; firstly, using YTA to help you build your audience and secondly, using YTA to improve audience engagement.

SECTION A - Building an audience

1 Who are your viewers?

The Demographics feature in…