How a Video Production Company Can Help with Your LinkedIn Ads
One of the most effective ways to attract, engage, and inform prospective customers is through a chic, trendy video. Written pieces with still photos will always play a big role in content marketing, but time-strapped consumers are increasingly looking to get the information they want and need about a company in video form –- which is where a video production company comes into to play. In many scenarios, it’s just easier to absorb video content. Try to read a brochure or whitepaper when you’re being bounced around on public transportation on your way to the office. But video? That works just about anytime, anywhere. Plus, when video content is done right, it can be both informative and entertaining. Bonus! Of course, nowadays it’s easier than ever to capture and edit video on your own. However, creating a finished piece that really engages your audience and keeps them watching from start to finish is a lot more challenging. Leveraging the expertise of an experienced video production company can be to your advantage in lots of ways. (And you’re looking for an advantage, right?) Quality video is an effective video One benefit of working with a video production company is that the end result will be a polished, professional piece that stands out from the crowd. And make no mistake… there is a crowd. Every marketing pro with a smartphone is a potential video producer/director/editor, but you want your material to adhere to the highest quality standards so it delivers the maximum competitive advantage. Efficient video production is cost-effective video production The more quickly and efficiently a LinkedIn sponsored video ad is produced, the more cost-effective it is. The trial-and-error approach is rarely efficient. Rather than asking your internal team to become video experts, it is typically a smarter choice to connect with a video production company that already has all the skills you need—and many you didn’t know you needed! Innovative video content is the most shared video Creating any kind of video ad for LinkedIn is a start. However, to truly succeed with your video content, you need the assistance of a video production company that can help you capture the attention of business decision makers and move them further along the buyer’s journey using an eye-catching video ad. Experienced video producers know what has and has not been done and what can be done to create a business-building buzz. The takeaway They say “the devil is in the details” and that couldn’t be more true with video production. Luckily, our video production team at BIGEYE absolutely loves being immersed in the details. From initial conception and storyboarding to editing and post-production, we thrive on the challenge of getting every last element right. How can passion for video production help your company get noticed using LinkedIn sponsored video ads? Get in touch with our production team today and let’s start developing a successful strategy for your brand.
Here are the Four Fun Content Ideas to Boost Engagement
Ever notice how the ads that people like best during the Superbowl are the funny ones? This shouldn’t be a surprise, because people love to be entertained (and if you don’t believe me, just take a look at how many movies you’ve watched on Netflix in the last month!). At our Florida advertising agency, we know companies don’t have to be super serious to also be perceived as professional. Take, for example, Geico, which deals with heavy insurance matters on a daily basis, many of which involve injury or even death. The brand could have taken an approach that touted the seriousness of the business and its commitment to all things insurance, but can you deny that would have been slightly, well…boring? Instead, it opted to give in to the creative impulse, generating an Australian talking lizard that is now etched into the mind of every person in America (whether we want him to be or not). My point is that your content doesn’t have to be stuffy, even if your industry isn’t all that laid back. As such, we’ve developed 4 fun content ideas that can help break your brand from the strongholds of thinking everything has to be all business, all the time. In looking at this list and generating your own creative content ideas, remember that people are most likely to share funny posts and uplifting content (hence, the success of sites like Buzzfeed and Upworthy). [quote]By generating your own content in this capacity, you’ll be giving your followers plenty to talk about.[/quote] 1. Stop-motion Vines: Who’d have thought a company like Lowes would have been a pioneer in the land of 6-second videos? Lowes’s series of Vines give you practical home tips with a DIY aura…all in six seconds! Check out this screwdriver/rubber band tip and tell me you’re not impressed. 2. Throwback Thursdays: What started out a few young people posting photos from their childhood on Instagram and Facebook is now a full-on trend. People love to see these photos from the times when you actually had to walk two miles in the snow uphill both ways to get to a place that would print out your photos. Even if your business isn’t necessarily trendy or cool, you can still tap into this trend by showing old photos of your founders or your first brick-and-mortar location, or even a photo of an old newspaper clipping about your business that you have hanging around. Just don’t forget to tag them “#tbt.” 3. One-Second-a-Day Videos: These types of videos can be extremely fun and inspiring, and take literally, one second a day to create (plus perhaps a little bit of time at the end to edit). Try showing one second a day from your work or your office to capture just a slice of your daily work. For a slightly different variation on this, make a one-minute video featuring exactly one second at 60 of your favorite local landmarks. And, the 1 Second Everyday app makes it super simple to record. 4. Awards and Recognition: People love to be recognized, and when you offer them some form of recognition, they’ll typically share that with their social circles. Recently, a friend of mine was recognized by a small women’s group. The company wrote a blog about her and invited her to speak at a free monthly panel discussion. The cost? Perhaps a couple of hours to write the blog and plan the event, and a few dollars to provide food and beverages at the panel. However, when the recipient shared her blog, the blog post generated thousands of page views, hundreds of likes, several shares on Facebook and tons of goodwill in the community. Recognizing a strong employee, young leader or a powerful member of your community is a great way to build visibility. Ready to chat about a few more ideas to get your fans talkin’? Contact our team at BIGEYE today to take your brand from bo-ring to bazinga!
The Importance of the Role of Design in Marketing
I recently subscribed to an email list for a friend’s business. But, when I saw the first email newsletter, I found myself very uneasy. The business deals with photography and design, and yet the email that landed in my inbox was a bare-bones, plain text email. You’d think someone like that would put more care into the message he’s trying to convey — maybe I need to tell him that the team at our Orlando marketing agency has a few ideas to help him understand the role of design in marketing. Now, in marketing, each of us has our strengths. I understand that a copywriter at our Orlando advertising agency shouldn’t necessarily be counted on to design a document, or a strategist doesn’t need to know a ton about website development. But I do think design should permeate through all areas of business. It’s important to have consistency in all brand assets. This doesn’t just mean print ads, but applies to internal and external marketing tools including sales decks, memos, website design, social media and, as you saw above, the email experience. The goal here is to make sure you’re telling the same story across all platforms. This will make it easier for people to identify your brand, and they can then follow along for the ride when they see your emails or your Facebook posts. And, it just looks nice! Thinking about my friend’s photography business, he probably has a number of excellent assets to help sell the story of his business. He’s asking people to spend a lot of money to use his services, and while having an email signup list is a great first step, that list also needs to reflect the essence of the brand he wants to create. A plain text email? I see plain text emails all the time. What I want is for you to really wow me! Use these visual techniques to help entice me to choose you over competitors. [quote]BIGEYE created a responsive web design for Arsenal Venture Partners that produced the ideal interaction they were hoping for. Check it out![/quote] Your website should be a reflection of your business. The assets you put on your site and photos that you choose are all ways you market yourself, so it’s important to take care in what you’re presenting to the world. This even goes into the user experience of the site – you need to make sure that if you have a shopping cart feature, it’s easy to use, and that if you have a ton of content on the site, it’s easy to navigate. For some reason, people tend to overlook these essential aspects in trying to design websites —but these days, you can’t afford not to think about them because they translate to real ROI. Recently, I heard about the Barbarian Group, an innovation agency in New York highly focused on design. True to the brand, when they moved to a new office, they emphasized the importance of design. As such, they created a massive single sharable desk as a place for people to keep ideas flowing. It’s a testament to the fact that design truly permeates every aspect of the business – even in the workplace setup. The team at our Orlando marketing firm knows the value of design, and would love to help you create and execute design-oriented marketing strategies. Contact us to set up an appointment to learn about how we can help you!
Viral Videos: Creating Videos People Love & Will Share
Flu season is upon us and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) says the number of recorded cases this year has already reached epidemic proportions. The team at our Orlando advertising agency has received office-wide preventative vaccines so shoo flu, don’t bother us! We hardly take the potential severity of Influenza lightly, but we can’t help but compare the virus’s widespread impact to another virus; a promotional technique for which there is no known prophylactic: viral video marketing. The term stems from the idea that if an ad reaches a “susceptible” user, that user becomes “infected” (i.e. accepts the idea), shares what they’ve seen with others, others do the same and so on and so forth. Viral Videos—VV’s we’ll call them—are a relatively new phenomenon owing their exponentially increasing presence to YouTube’s 2005 launch. Not all VVs contain a marketing component, but for the purposes of this extremely well written and thought-out blog piece, we’re only interested in those that do. One of the first VV campaigns was released even before it had broadly reaching social platforms like YouTube and Reddit at its disposal. Recorded way back in 1995 A.D.—the same year O.J. was on trial and Alicia Silverstone played Cher in Clueless, the greatest cinematic masterpiece of the 20th century— Loronix Information Systems released an innovative ad promoting surveillance computers. THIS CLIP features a distraught, overweight cubicle worker with a case of misplaced rage. The clip played on one of the most important aspects of VV marketing. Just like the first rule of Fight Club, “You do not talk about Fight Club,” the first rule of VV marketing is making sure not to make transparent an intention to sell a product or service. For a video to even be considered “viral,” the litmus test is 100,000 views within a 24-hour span—anything less than that, and it falls into the much lesser “cough due to cold” category. In order to reach such lofty numbers without seeking “seeding help” from companies like Pimp My Views or View Tornado, a VV must first and foremost entertain. A recent Forbes article calls this approach “Candy with the Medicine,” a philosophy that recognizes a message is best received within entertainment. So, focusing first on the entertainment value (the candy) and then following with the message (the medicine) is the only way to ensure maximum results. From an application standpoint, which would you rather watch? THIS or THIS? The first is part of a series of Old Spice commercials developed by Oregon ad agency, Wieden and Kennedy. Titled “Believe in your Smelf” it’s a follow-up to “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” which received 40 million YouTube views in 12 months, leading to a Twitter following increase of 2700%, a Facebook interaction increase of 800% and an overall sales of Old Spice body wash 107% increase. The second clip is a more traditional, jingle reliant commercial. It also happens to be one of the most obnoxious, ear gratingly, jaw grindingly, amateur spectacles ever to come out of New York. It shoves the “message” down the consumer’s throat while casting the “entertainment” portion of the model to the wayside. In summation, the first example makes viewers laugh; the second doubtless forces them question the future prospects of the human race. Viral Videos: providing hope for humanity. Interested in ways to create viral video content that has the potential to spread your brand message to the masses? Contact our team of video production experts today!
Video Production 101: What You Need To Know Before Doing Video
For a company taking its first shot at creating video content, it can be overwhelming to walk into a meeting room for the first time to create a digital video strategy. Often, new content creators are unfamiliar with the actual costs and types of teams needed to help successfully create and distribute digital video content. It’s important to remember that your team is not alone in wanting to create content; you are competing with thousands of other brands and individuals who are each vying for a piece of your audience’s time. This audience attention is a limited resource… until there are magically more hours in the day, the amount of time people have to consume content is not going to change anytime soon. Below are a few tips from our Orlando video production agency to help ease you through the process of creating your first branded video for optimum resource allocation and sharability. Have a Good Idea: This seems like a no-brainer, but you might be surprised at the number of people who want to create content just for the sake of creating content. It is essential to remember that bad content reflects poorly on your brand, and is unlikely to be shared organically. Brainstorm an idea that’s on-brand, and targets your audience. (If you don’t have a good idea, fear not! Our Florida marketing agency is brimming with agency experts who have the knowledge and understanding to help you create a digital video concept that captures your brand. Assign a Project Manager/ Producer: This is a crucial step in creating a successful video. The project manager should be the person in control of the actual production process. This person should have the responsibility of overseeing the budget, and may assign people to schedule shoots and secure essential film equipment. This person may also step in as a producer, who can give feedback to the production team. The project manager will ultimately also be responsible for formulating a distribution strategy. [quote] For more ideas about how to amplify the reach of your digital video content, contact the team at our Florida advertising agency to talk about making the most out of your project, no matter what your budget. [/quote] Create a Budget: In my experience, a company can create a piece of digital content at almost any budget. I’ve seen successful videos shot at production values of less than $200, and I’ve seen hundreds of thousands of dollars thrown away on campaigns that didn’t quite hit the mark. More money can buy you better tools, but they can’t make a bad idea good. In fact, some studies suggest that production values have absolutely no bearing on a viewer’s perception of a digital video. I recommend that a brand settle on a budget after coming up with the idea, as it will help to determine what’s realistically feasible. If your concept involves flying in an elephant from Nigeria, but you’re working with a small budget, it’s worth it to see if the same effect can be achieved using a green screen or editing device. Formulate a Distribution Strategy: Will your strategy involve sponsored placements on sites like Twitter and Facebook? Or are you depending on shares alone, targeting influencers and popular bloggers within your network? No matter what your strategy, the most important part is to have a strategy in place for when you’re ready to put your video out into the world.
The newest buzzwords & what they mean to your company
The marketing and advertising industries are notorious for making up their own buzzwords, in order to emphasize and, in some cases, glamorize trends and ideas as they come into the public space. (I once received an email from a media company encouraging me to “techcessorize” my iPad – how’s THAT for corny PR language?) Here are a few definitions intended to flush out fresh trends from Orlando advertising agencies, and what they could mean for you. Advocacy: A new phase in the traditional marketing cycle, where fans of a brand encourage active engagement by sharing, via their own social media platforms. Aggregator: An aggregator collects content from a number of sites around the web, and allows people to search the aggregated content to find links that they may find of interest. Popular aggregators include Reddit and Google Reader RSS Feeds. Agile Marketing: A marketing technique that involves the use of agile tactics, such as real-time response to marketing opportunities, brief stand-up meetings and investing resources in production and project execution (as opposed to planning). API: Application Programming Interface. Companies such as Facebook and Foursquare allow third-party applications to access their systems in order to create innovative uses for such platforms. App: Short for application. Though mostly associated with smartphones and iPads, browser-based applications may connect to Facebook or other social networks, such as Facebook games like The Sims Social or Words with Friends. Content Marketing: Based on the theory that good content creates reader and viewer interest and encourages engagement and social sharing, content marketing describes the consistent generation of branded content to create and sustain search engine traffic, and to keep people returning to a company’s website or social platforms. (Content marketing = keeping your blog up to date.) eCommerce: All commerce activities that occur on the internet. While people commonly think of companies such as eBay and Amazon, newer power players in the eCommece industry include companies such as Groupon and Fab. Engagement: The process by which readers and viewers interact with your content, generally by commenting, “liking,” up-voting, mentioning and sharing. Frictionless Design: The development of intuitive, painless digital interfaces that reduce bounce, increase conversion and increase user satisfaction. Gamification: This technological function makes digital behavior into a game. Though Foursquare didn’t create this type of tactic, which encourages repetitious behaviors that presumably lead to more points, the company made it popular by including “badges” in its platforms, allowing people to earn various badges (and therefore, social capital) for their check-ins. Hybrid: A hybrid delineates a person who has a broad skill set applicable to a number of technological disciplines, though that person typically also has one or two areas of true expertise. Infographic: A visual representation of a data set. Sometimes funny or downright hilarious. Meme: You know those funny cat pictures, or those sarcastic eCards that always pop up in your Facebook feed? As people share those photos and images, and continue to alter them in ways that are humorous and make sense within the context of the original content, they becomes Internet memes. (It’s pronounced like “theme.”) Native Speakers (of Technology): This term is used to describe a generation that is growing up with smartphones, tablets and computers as the norm. These children are learning through interactive games as opposed to books and notebook paper. Pivoting: When a company realizes it’s not meeting its goals, it may pivot to set a new trajectory. This may occur in a single marketing campaign, or may apply to an entire business strategy. SEM: Search engine marketing. SEM may involve paid search, search engine optimized content, or both. Social Capital: Many people believe that social capital is at the core of most individuals’ content creation and sharing behaviors. The theory is that people share content with the hope or idea that it will elevate or retain one’s status within their online community. Put simply, the idea is that people share content because it makes them “look cool.” Social Listening: Monitoring digital media to assess what’s being said about a company, brand, product, or person on the internet in real time. Listening provides opportunities for quick response to customers, get ahead of public relations issues, and trending topics. Social TV: This describes technologies and behaviors that combine television and social media content. For instance, when brand marketers encourage fans to live Tweet sporting events, this is a form of social TV. Trendjacking: Leveraging a trending topic to generate buzz around a brand. Like most marketing tactics – there are smart, creative ways to do this right, and also terrible, clunky attempts that get this all wrong. Viral Video: No one can create a viral video; rather, they can aim to create a video that “goes viral.” Though many viral videos have well over 1,000,000 views, a video can be said to have achieved some level of virality at views as low as 100,000. We sometimes throw these words around at our Orlando marketing agency, but we’ll never leave you in the dark about what they mean, and the implications for your company. (And we’ll never ask you to techcessorize ANYTHING.) Contact us and we’ll help fill you in on the fancy lingo.
Instagram in the OR: Using social media to bring comfort to others
I never thought when making the switch from nursing school student to an advertising major in college that I would have the opportunity to witness an open-heart surgery on a small child. But that is exactly the experience I had last month. BIGEYE had the honor to be asked by our client, Arnold Palmer Hospital for Children, to produce a video about their cardiology program. As part of that video, our crew was graciously allowed in the operating room to witness an amazing surgical team, lead by Dr. William DeCampli, repair little 3-year-old Emily Stone’s heart.We literally got to participate in history being made. The hospital broke ground by trying something relatively unheard of in healthcare: using social media to share a live surgical operation with the entire world. The hospital posted images and updates of the surgery every 10 minutes through the photo sharing application Instagram, pushing the updates out via their Twitter and Facebook profiles, as well as their blog. For me, it definitely brought new meaning to a photo app that I primarily use to apply artistic filters to pictures of my food. The response was overwhelming as the world watched and cheered on little Emily with amazing words of encouragement. It was awesome, in the truest sense of the word, to be so openly allowed into a world that is usually very closed off to the public. Pushing the envelope will always bring on a slew of questions: Why did they do this? Does social media go too far? What role can social media play in healthcare? The very nature of social media encourages debate and provides a portal for honest discussions. Mike Schmidt, director of digital media at Arnold Palmer Hospital, said it best: “Healthcare is behind the rest of the world in being able to tell stories well through social media. There are thousands of amazing things that happen here at the hospital each and every day, and we want to share that with our community.” Advertising, taglines, slogans and pictures of happy patients all have their place in healthcare. They play a role in communicating to the public a hospital’s message: who they are and what they stand for. But what about showing, not just telling, what really goes on? There may not be anything “pretty” about surgical procedures, but they are real, raw, and honest. We’re talking about humans saving other human’s lives. Arnold Palmer Hospital and Emily’s family were ready to take that leap by sharing this life-saving procedure with the world. The fact is, surgeons and healthcare professionals alike live and breathe this every day, and that’s what has a true impact on their patient’s lives. Social media is here to stay and will continue to evolve and change. Yes, seeing pictures of a beating heart on your Facebook timeline may not be for everyone, but I do commend the hospital on using a tool that we are all familiar with in a new and interesting way in order to keep people informed of what’s going on behind the curtain. It breaks down barriers and can remove the mystery of the “unknown” for families that may be going through something very scary, hearing their child has congenital heart disease. On a very important side note, Emily is doing well. It was a joy to get to know her and her family throughout this process. She’s a brave little girl! You can see how the story unfolded on the hospitals blog, Illuminate. Warning: some of the pictures are graphic in nature. Written by, Laura Adams, BIGEYE Creative Account Manager
Ben & Jerry’s Twitter Treats, promotion in a creative way
Most Twitter users hardly ever use all of the allotted 140 characters they’re allowed to tweet. Ben & Jerry’s decided to utilize this fact to promote a witty campaign called Fair Tweets (see the video splainer – a BIGEYE favorite), not only for its company, but also for a good cause. On May 14, in honor of World Fair Trade Day, Ben & Jerry’s asked Twitter users to donate their spare characters to raise awareness of Fair Trade. They created a user-friendly application that allows people to type tweet whatever they’d like and automatically fills in the remaining unused characters with a Fair Trade message and hyperlink. So, if your tweet is only 20 characters, Ben & Jerry’s will immediately fill in a 120-character message about Fair Trade for you … and they might even throw in a link or hashtag too. Once your message is created, you simply click the “Tweet It!” button, and your Fair Trade message is sent off to Twitter for all of your followers to see. It takes two seconds (depending on your typing skills), and spreads awareness for Fair Trade around the world. Not to mention, it leads people to Ben & Jerry’s as well. Promoting a cause through your company is always admirable, but Ben & Jerry’s showed us how to make it clever and fun too. We think they deserve two thumbs up for promoting themselves and a good cause in a cool, non-garish sort of way. Don’t you? To learn how to effectively incorporate twitter into your campaign, contact us here!
