Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and YouTube. These social media platforms are incredibly useful for promoting your business in the digital age of marketing. They're incredibly helpful too, but it's good to think outside the box sometimes and look at platforms that you may not be aware of - that just might just get you a little more attention. 5. Pinterest Okay, so this is a pretty well known site, but there's not a lot of businesses that utilise Pinterest for what it's worth. A bit of a mix between Facebook and Instagram, this site is perfect if you're in the creative industry. What makes Pinterest different to other social media sites is it's organic capabilities. The organic reach on a Pinterest post is determined by what kinds of keywords you have used in your post, if they align with the users search, and how many there are. Effectively, this allows you to plan out a strategy in capturing your audience's attention without spending a dime! 4. Snapchat Again, if you haven't heard of this one you must be living under a rock, but what you may not know is how effective Snapchat can be when advertising your business. If you don't know what Snapchat is, it's an app that lets users send a photo or video either directly to another user or to their Snapchat Story, which can be seen by anyone depending on who you allow to see it. If your marketing campaign caters towards the younger demographic, [...]

Facebook videos are becoming an ever growing powerful marketing tool for any business to add into their marketing strategies. They allow for instant feedback, engagement and most importantly action to be taken driving traffic to your product or service! Facebook videos are cost effective, versatile and profitable when used correctly. There are more than one billion people active on Facebook, with an average of 8 billion videos viewed daily, that's a lot of people that could be watching your marketing content. 1. Upload your videos directly to Facebook YouTube is an amazing hosting platform for videos, but if you're looking at capturing a Facebook audience, post them straight on there! Facebook native videos perform up to 4 times better than all other video formats according to Quintly's study. 2. Keep them short and snappy - and yes we mean as short as possible Audiences attention spans are short at the best of times, whilst on social media you need to strike whilst the iron is hot. Capture their attention in the shortest time possible to get them to stick around on your autoplay video. Unless the viewer is already interested and actively engaging with your brand, you'll only have the time a finger scroll to make a potential prospect notice you, go get them! 3. Make sure you can get them with or without sound This goes back to the last point, unless people are actively already super engaged with your brand, it's likely they're only going to come across your [...]

We're all about communication. We recently researched into communication barriers that could be causing your business problems. You can read this, here. From our experience in getting to the core of every business we collaborate with, we get to see a lot of varying company cultures. One culture that's shone out for us is Christeyns. Managing Director, Nick Garthwaite spoke to us about how he started to work on building this. From his experience, we've outlined 3 takeaway's that can help your business. Don't run your business based on fear 100% attendance bonuses, pay caps for not hitting quotas, commission only pay incentives, the list could go on. Don't punish your staff, value them! Old fashioned management styles kill a positive culture. Combine the money you'd put into bonuses and increase employees wages. Or alternatively offer them simple things like available free fruit. These gestures cost nothing in the big scheme of business, but will incentivise your staff more than any scare tactic and help them to feel as though the company that they spend most of their week in, truly values them. A valued employee adds value to business. Change is driven from the top If change is needed in the business, it needs to trickle down from management. It's the only way to make the changes you want happen. If management don't stick to the adaptations to your business then why would the rest of your employees? Lead by example and inspire the change you want to [...]

As companies, we invest so much time in communication outwards, to our customers or potential customers. But, actually the most valuable conversations we should be having are within the organisation, to the heart and soul of your company, to the employees that work within. Company culture resinates in everything you broadcast. If your employees feel valued, truly great things start to happen. Behind every great business, is a great company culture.  People often mistake that flash offices, high salaries and bonus benefits are what creates a positive work environment; all of these things will of course help boost employee moral but without the most important (and free) offering of respect and appreciation of each and every person, no flashy gift will solve the problems within. At its worst, this can result in an unhappy work environment, high turnover in staff meaning high costs of training to the business and lower efficiency, resulting in an all round costly repetitive lesson. So if the answer is free why do so many businesses completely miss the mark? We'll outline 5 different communication barriers and how to spot, and overcome them. The sticking point The infamous point in internal communications where information is filtered down through management. But the problem? People forget to pass down the message, they forget important factors, they forget to relay the why and just impose changes. The list goes on! There are so many issues when it comes to simply passing down messages through a funnel based on hierarchy [...]

Call to actions on videos can be a valuable way of driving traffic to desired areas, or a completely pointless tool if not utilised properly. Thankfully, they've evolved from the days when their main purpose was to obstruct the viewers ability to watch the video unless they sought after a small exit button on every bubble. Now they blend seamlessly into your videos, allowing for a much more friendly user experience and some pretty desirable results for marketeers. In this post, we'll explore 5 ways in which you can maximise your CTAs visibility and get the results you're looking for. 1. Let's start from the beginning On average, with a 60s video you have about 3-5 seconds to make an impact on the viewer. Around 20% of viewers won't finish your video (kissmetrics). Due to this, you're gonna want to get your primary purpose of the video (your CTA) up front and centre as quickly as possible so that 100% of your viewers have the opportunity to complete that action. 2. Getting a lead Lead generation is arguably one of the most vital parts of marketing and your videos can do more than just increase awareness around your brand, service or product. It can literally direct the lead to your sales team and get the ball rolling at high speeds towards new business opportunities. This type of CTA should be used alongside the rest of your marketing content, i.e blogs, social media & email marketing campaigns to have the [...]

More than half a BILLION hours of videos are watched on YouTube each day. When you also combine sharing your video on social media sites such as Facebook (which has 100 million video views daily), you have the potential for a pretty vast reach in audience...but what should you be looking at once the video's been shared? 1. Watch time This is the total amount of time viewers have spent watching your video. Youtube ranks videos that have the highest watch time engagement rates over those with higher views. 2. Average Completion Rate Average completion rate measures how well your video holds the viewers attention. The more people that watch your full video, the higher Facebook will rank your videos in viewers news feeds.  3.  Audience Retention Paying attention to where your audiences engagement either dips in engagement or they rewatch a specific part of your video frequently will allow you to gain a further understanding of how they like to be communicated with, meaning that you can shape your future content that truly resonates with your audience. 4.  Click Through Rate Maybe one of the most important things, how many people took the desired action after watching your video? If this click through rate is low, maybe think about changing up your call to action (CTA). Most people don't watch videos all the way through, so be mindful of this when you're thinking about the placement of the CTA. 5. Average View Duration The average view duration is the [...]

We'd like to offer our knowledge to help up your online game in terms of what you use to compliment your social posts. Whether you're always scouring for copyright free images, music, or just general creative inspiration, we've got you covered. Here's some of the sites we use daily to create high quality social media work. Let's kick things off with copyright free image sites: Unsplash One of the largest photography suppliers on the internet. 'Unsplash is a website dedicated to sharing copyright-free photography under the Unsplash license. The website claims over 65,000 contributing photographers and generates an estimated 4 billion photo impressions per month. Unsplash has been cited as one of the world’s leading photography websites by Forbes.' Freerange Stock Freerange Stock was formed with the goal to provide quality stock photos for commercial and non-commercial use, for free. Images on the site are either shot by Freerange Stock, drawn from Freerange archives, or contributed by a talented community of photographers. Pexels Pexels state: 'It's hard to understand complex licenses. That is why all photos on Pexels are licensed under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license. This means the pictures are completely free to be used for any legal purpose.' The pictures are free for personal and even for commercial use. You can modify, copy and distribute the photos. All without asking for permission or setting a link to the source. So, attribution is not required. Life of Pix 'Life of Pix offers high-resolution photographs with no copyright restrictions. The photographs were contributed by [...]