It isn’t news that people are exposed to more ideas than ever before. This is due to the fact that people are exposed to more media than ever before. It is through the media (newspapers, television, radio, the internet and more specifically the social media…) that ideas are spread, but sheer quantity makes it difficult to be seen and heard above all of the noise.

In this climate, what can you do to make your ideas stand out?

Two people who have attempted to answer this question are brothers Chip and Dan Heath. There came a point when the brothers realised that despite working in very different fields, they had both reached a stage where they were trying to answer the same question: ‘why do some ideas stick while others fail?’ This question became the title of…

Defining budget and timescales for video production

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Whether you're joining the video revolution for the very first time, or thinking about your next online video project, one thing will be paramount to ensuring its success: preparation.

Like any other marketing strategy, setting clear goals for video production is an essential part of your preparation. Clearly defined goals will stop you from wasting time and money, and ensure your video delivers an effective message to your target audience.

It's all very well deciding you want to increase the use of online video in your marketing strategy, but skipping the vital step of setting realistic goals will limit the success of your project.

As Benjamin Franklin famously said: by failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.

Setting Your Goals

Goal setting is a powerful process to help keep you focused.…

A great video can change the world

A combination of the right stories, the right visuals and the right music can be powerful enough to bring the masses on board with a cause. This is a great tool for marketers who are using video every day to win their audiences over. However, video technology is now in the hands of the many, rather than the few, and the underdog has a fighting chance which can cause BIG damage to existing brands as the first example shows. The balance of power has shifted and the big brands need to be wary… their best weapon can quite easily become their biggest enemy.

Here are five great examples of videos that have been made to bring about some kind of social change – from simply highlighting an injustice, to big calls to action for a specific cause.

1. Abercrombie & Fitch Gets a Brand Readjustment #FitchTheHomeless

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The what, why and how of infographics marketing using social media

In today’s fast-paced social media world, if you want your message to be seen, you need to include a visual. Whether it’s a picture of your dog, a map, or an infographic, articles with images attached get 94 percent more total views than plain text. Of all the visuals available, infographics are an especially compelling way to capture the attention of online readers.

Consumers are bombarded every day with so much social media content that you need to include something that can get their attention and educate them quickly and succinctly. Whether you’re using a visual social network like Pinterest or Instagram or a text-based platform like Twitter, infographics fit the bill. So what is it that makes infographics so engaging in a social media format? Infographics are popular…

A checklist of 10 best practices for creating infographics for marketing

You'll be all to familiar with infographics, so I won't bore you with an explanation. Some argue that infographics can only be about data visualised (charts, comparisons, Venn diagrams, graphs, flow-charts etc). Suffice to say that we believe the term covers more than just that and includes any graphics that explain something, a concept for example. For us, if it's visual, useful or entertaining and sharable, it's an infographic! We used that approach for our Content Marketing Matrix infographic and the inbound marketing process which aren't classic data infographics, but we got good feedback that they were useful and they were shared. So this is how Dave Chaffey and I see it, here is our checklist for creating the perfect marketing infographic. I've also written a follow-up on promoting infographics. We will illustrate it with extracts…

The rise and fall? of infographics

According to the volume of searches in Google Trends shown in this infographic, the popularity of infographics has increased by 800% over two years since 2010.

Perhaps surprisingly, the latest figures have shown a slight decrease in searches since May this year. Do you think infographics are becoming less effective from your use of them?

We think infographics remain a great tool to visually share and represent information and knowledge, both within the organisation and externally for outreach. Of course, it's important to get the quality right as Dan Bosomworth explains in his post giving 10 best practices for the perfect marketing infographic. We try to produce useful infographics which help marketers explain practices such as those we have collected in our free Digital Marketing Infographics pack.

We've noticed a growth in use of tools for creating…

Examples and tips showing how to get the best out of YouTube

While YouTube is certainly an ideal place to while away the hours before quitting time at work, many people also view it as the place to head when they want to learn about...pretty much anything. Of course, all of this translates into a lot of people spending a lot of time viewing and posting content on YouTube every hour of every single day of the week. With all of these people looking to YouTube to guide them in everything from their choice of car to the finer points of craft beer making, unless your brand includes YouTube as part of its strategy, you are likely missing out on valuable opportunities to expand awareness of your brand, increase your online visibility, attract new customers, and deepen relationships with current customers. Embarking on a new…

Facebook launches new 15 second video service on Instagram

Value/Importance: [rating=3] Recommended link: Instagram's Getting started on Video Help pages We recently showed how Instagram can be an effective marketing tool for small businesses. So the recent announcement by Mark Zuckerberg has been followed with great interest by small business marketers in particular. Increasingly free, bite-sized video is being used to support engagement through social media, whether it's through Vine,  the short 6 second looping video on Twitter, Google+ Hangouts or Youtube video being integrated across multiple channels.  Social media users are loving visual content sharing, shown by the use of vine already used by 13m iOS users by June when it was first released on Android. Now Facebook has responded by offering a video option to its  130m Instagram users.

What is…

A briefing and research on native video advertising effectiveness

Native video advertising is potentially quite controversial. The term refers to advertising that is designed to blend in with the page it is placed on. In other words, it is advertising that is trying to look like it isn’t advertising. Genius? Or just sneaky? Native video advertising is watched by viewers by choice. The power of choice over being ‘forced’ to watch is undeniable. When a viewer chooses to watch an advert the impact on branding is far more positive than when a viewer has no choice. In this article I am going to share the findings of two recent research studies into the effectiveness of native video advertising. I am going to look at the value of the findings and also raise some questions about the ethics of a native approach.

Sharethrough

Sharethrough are a native advertising platform who believe in thoughtfully integrated brand…

Making User-Generated Content a core feature of the online fashion-buying experience

You may know Boticca since they are active content marketers who have worked with bloggers to build a strong social media presence with 35,000 Twitter followers, more than 50,000 Facebook fans, 50,000 Pinterest followers and 3,000 Tumblr followers. They're a great example of how to engage through content and then convert that interest to sale and advocacy through permission marketing. In this example we take a look at their latest Instagram campaign since more marketers are looking to tap into it since its growth has continued since it was purchased by Facebook. They use Instagram by linking to the Gallery from the Boticca.com homepage, in a section call "The Edit", which is a selection of photographs curated by Boticca's visual merchandisers.

The photographs in the Gallery…