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8Mar

How to Use Youtube to Market Your Business

Posted by: Katie Leimkuehler Categories: Social Media
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video_marketing

With over 30 million unique visitors per day and thousands of hours of videos uploaded every day, Youtube is the world’s largest video search engine. In fact, Youtube is currently the world’s second largest search engine for online content in general. What does this mean for your business?

It means that if you can find a way to harness Youtube, you can drive a ton of traffic to your business, increase your industry relevance, and become a go-to resource and well-known authority in your niche.

However, like any platform, it takes time, effort, commitment, and more importantly, knowledge of the right strategies to enjoy significant success on the platform. We’ll discuss a few tips here to get you started.

Find Popular Videos and Mirror Their Content

They say that imitation is the finest form of flattery. Well, you’ll have to do the same here. We’re not saying that you should go and duplicate existing content — that would be unethical. But we are saying that you need to learn everything you can about the competition. If someone has tried to do the same kind of thing you’re considering in your own marketing, find out who’s done it before and how. If they did something that worked, find out how. If they did something that didn’t, find out why. And whatever they did, do a better job, whether it’s through the tactics of the medium or the quality of the content.

To do that, therefore, do a search for the most popular channels in your industry and Youtube in general. See what they are doing, and take copious notes of their methods. Some of those videos may not have any direct correlation to your industry, but you could learn a thing or two from the concepts. For instance, if you own a plumbing business, instead of just creating how-tos, you could create a series of videos about funny or worst job experiences. This will grow your brand and popularity on the platform.

Optimize Your Videos and Channels

Create a fully optimized and branded Youtube account. To do this, use target keywords in the name of your channel, and always optimize all your videos with the appropriate keywords so that they benefit from high visibility in Youtube and Google searches.

Create short videos, just a few minute long at the most. Most people are now averse to watching videos that are 20+mins in length. Instead of just creating one long video, create four 5min videos, upload them to Youtube, and create a playlist so that people can watch them one after the other if they want that 20 minute Youtube experience.

Produce Top-Notch Content

Nothing works better on Youtube than creating excellent content. You may not need to hire a professional film crew to accomplish this. Just get comfortable with the camera and remember that all the entertainment and education your video may offer is meant to be part of a dialogue with your audience, and simply have that conversation with the camera.

For those who are too camera-shy, and for those niches that support it, you can use screen-recording software and record a voice-over for it. This can illustrate what a person could do, say, with a software product you may be trying to showcase.

In case you want to interact more with your audience, you can create interactive Q&A sessions using Google Hangouts or Live Events, which you can make available to people and list as part of your content.

Find Leading Influencers in Your Niche and Engage Them

There are often leading influencers on Youtube that you can get to promote your business if you’re so inclined. If you don’t want to go the long route of building an authority niche and are willing to spend some money, you could locate some of these influencers and get them to promote your business on their channels and videos. Whether you do this manually or through a simplified service like NeoReach’s social media influencer marketing platform, you can find established personalities on Youtube that can support your brand and marketing efforts by lending your business their reach.

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9Dec

How to Find the Right Influencers to Grow Your Business

Posted by: Katie Leimkuehler Categories: Social Media
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As social media becomes an increasingly stable part of our lives and business, it makes sense to look for ways to benefit from it. Advertising using social media platforms has its huge benefits.

Not only is comparatively cheaper to launch a social media campaign, the returns on investment in terms of capital, brand visibility and loyalty can be quite huge. If this is something that appeals to you, then you should consider hiring influencers –social or otherwise- to help promote your business and make your brand more popular.

Just in case you don’t know what social influencers are, it’s simply a select group of individuals with a lot of following on social media. Some of these people aren’t even celebs in the real sense of the word.

People just like them and want to be associated with them because of the value that they bring to the table. Lucky for you, there are quite a few of them out there in various niches and industry. You’ll need to know how to find them, though. The following tips should help you do just that.

Use Social Influencer Platforms

This is fastest and easiest way to find influencers in your niche or related niches. You can either decide to do this manually –which can take up so much of your time- or use platforms like Neoreach which essentially brings brands and social influencers together for mutually rewarding partnerships.

Other tools you can try using include Buzzsumo, Hootsuite and Google Alerts. But none provides the direct access that Neoreach has to social influencers.

Look for Popular Relevant Bloggers and Pitch them

Look for popular bloggers in your niche and see if they would be interested in promoting your brand and business to their followers. Please note that you might also want to ensure that the popular bloggers actually have a following and a tribe.

This is important because there are bloggers who are popular for junk –Perez Hilton comes to mind- and have an audience that contribute no meaningful thing to their blogs.

For popular bloggers like this, chances are you won’t get manyreturns on your investment. Instead, check out blogs with considerable and valuable interactions among its audience and administrators.

Consider Reach and Engagement Frequency

These two are more important than anything. It’s not enough to have an influencer with 500,000 followers but can’t seem to generate up to 1,000 likes, shares or retweets for whatever they share.

You want one that has both the reach and engagement. The perfect social influencer can get the word out on your products and you’ll notice increased engagement, traffic, leads, sales and revenues from just that campaign.

How Authentic Are the Influencers

Most people would rather hear from an influencer who posts only when there’s something valuable to share, than someone who posts every junk he or she sees. People trust the former more than they do the latter.

So, look for authenticity, value and rabid engagement on their posts. For instance, you could have an influencer with 5 million followers that posts only once a week and generates as much as 2,000-10,000 comments, and over 50,000 likes.

These are the perfect influencers that you ought to do business with. They are more likely to help you grow your business and explode your brand. Please note that they may be a tad pricey, but rest assured that you will recoup every investment and then some.

Ability to Trigger Positive Action from their Audience

You need an influencer that’s able to rally or elicit some response from their audience. These influencers are often in the habit of consistently offering value to their audience. As a result, their audiences have grown to trust and engage with them. Look for influencers like this because they will generate a healthy ROI for you.

Guest Post by Oscar King

Oscar King, a small business owner and freelance writer shares articles and insights into effective marketing. If you would like to learn more about Oscar, you can check out his google+ profile.

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20Aug

5 Ways to Market Your Business

Posted by: Katie Leimkuehler Categories: Career Start-Ups
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The time has to come to spread the word about your business and tell people just how fabulous it is! And how do you do that? Check out these crucial marketing techniques.

1. Share you work. The newest way is to showcase your work is through Pinterest. The site lets you not only look for inspiration for your next project, but it lets you show off your current work. The image-based website allows users to post or “pin” images and photos to “boards” that serve as category organizers that you can share with your followers. Think of it as a real life bulletin board come to life—only in the public eye.

2. Build relationships. Never underestimate the power of meeting new people and maintaining strong relationships with them—both in person and online. This goes beyond networking. It’s about fostering work friendships that can create opportunities for you before you’re even looking for them.

3. Become an expert. If you have a strong focus in a specialty area people will come to you time and time again because they know you are the expert. Carve out a niche that sets yourself apart from other designers.

4. Dress the part. Not only should you be dressing to impress your client in person; impress them online. Develop a high quality, intriguing and creative website that entices clients to want to meet you in person. These days most first impressions are formed online so make sure it’s a great one. Need inspiration? Check out the Top 10 Best Flash Websites of 2012.

5. Create buzz. Develop a social media strategy that engages users that is not just self-promotional. Try to become a source for clients with industry news, relevant content and foster those relationships through conversations. Think of it as your own word-of- mouth marketing, but through an online platform.

*This post was originally printed in the IIDA Design Matters blog.

Making relationships both online and in-person is key for marketing your business.

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