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Pinterest has implemented some major changes over the past year. One of the biggest developments has been their shift towards new types of content. Specifically, video content is receiving a lot more traction on Pinterest these days.
Pinterest marketers are investing a lot more in video pins, as the algorithm is placing more emphasis on them. One study by Pinterest found that 67% of its users have taken action after watching a video pin. The number of video pins increased six times between 2018 and 2019. These are numbers that marketers simply cannot ignore.
Unfortunately, creating quality video pins can seem intimidating. Pinterest marketers must follow these tips to use video pins effectively.
Use reliable hosting for UX
Why is this relevant to video marketing on Pinterest? It all boils down to setting user experiences.
User experience (UX) optimization is crucial for any form of online marketing. Pinterest video marketing is no exception.
When you create a landing page for users that discovered your video pins, you will need to match the expectations that you laid out in your Pinterest content. After clicking video links, users tend to expect that the destination landing page will have video content as well.
This means that you need a reliable hosting plan. Video files tend to be large and cumbersome. They can consume a lot of bandwidth and slow the webpage loading time if your hosting is not up to par.
Use text overlays for a strong call to action
The major benefit of video pins is their visibility. Unfortunately, there is a downside. Users tend to watch Pinterest videos, rather than clicking on them like they would other pins. As a result, the CTR tends to be lower.
You need to be more creative to get users to click through to your website. You should have text overlays with a strong CTA. This text could say something like “Click the article link below to see the rest” or “learn more at domain.com”.
A strong CTA will go a long way towards driving visitors to your site. You will be able to leverage the superior visibility of video pins and still drive traffic.
Don’t give everything away in your video
Pinterest marketers started using infographics to boost engagement a few years ago. They found that infographics received lots of shares, but often had very low CTRs.
This was often because the content creators gave away all the information in the infographic itself. Users didn’t have a strong incentive to visit the website for more information.
Video marketers have discovered the same thing. Why would a customer click through to your website if you shared everything in the video already?
You need to avoid sharing all of your content in the video. Customers also need to know that they have to visit your site for the rest of the content.
This approach is easy to implement with list style content. You could have a blog post on the 10 best carpet cleaning products that you sell. Your video could have the same title, but you only share the first five. The end of your video could tell users that they need to visit your site to see the other five.
Use the right tools and resources to create great video content
Creating video content from scratch can seem very intimidating. The process will go a lot faster if you use the right tools and resources.
You can find a lot of stock videos from sites like Pixabay. You can also conduct Creative Commons searches on YouTube to find videos to repurpose.
You should also use video creation and editing tools. My favorite is Canva, because you can use it to create video specifically for Pinterest. Wave, VideoLeap, Slider and Filmora are also excellent video creation tools.
Keep your videos short
If you have used YouTube for video marketing in the past, you probably Are used to creating longer videos. The ideal video length on YouTube varies by niche, but most marketers find the sweet spot is somewhere between 5 and 10 minutes. Even the average mobile user is on YouTube for 40 minutes.
You need to create much shorter videos for Pinterest. Pinterest allows you to publish videos that are up to 15 minutes long. However, user attention spans are much lower than they are on YouTube. The most successful videos are only between 6 and 15 seconds. That is a fraction of the time that most elevator pitches are meant for.
You need to know how to condense your content as much as possible. Find a creative way to get your core message across in just a few seconds.
Featured Image Licensed from Shutterstock - By Alexander Supertramp
As manufacturers around the globe are integrating automation for promising results, the bottomline is to increase efficiency and productivity. While manufacturers are benefiting with increased production, employees are no longer required to perform repetitive tasks.
This shift has surely helped manufacturers eliminate positions that can be taken care of by a software system to introduce automation in the procedure.
While processes can be chosen for automation for a number of reasons; the four important consideration that every manufacturer should contemplate are:
If the process is repetitive in nature
In needs to be error-free
It doesn’t require human intervention for completion
The process must be performed consistently
Business process automation is the subset of business process management and only focuses on specific tasks. Such automation in industries is also about reducing physical labor, automating workflows, and also eliminating the scope of error in various processes.
Fundamental Principles of Business Automation
Every business has its distinctive way of introducing business process automation but there are some fundamental processes that they must follow:
Understand Simplify & Automate
Understand why your business needs automation. It is of foremost priority for you to first incompletely understand the system, analyze it thoroughly and then go ahead with the implementation task.
Once it is done, you must try to simplify it to the greatest extent possible. Only after a thorough analysis and learning the scope of software implementation (to automate processes), you should consider process automation.
Integration with Existing Processes
There are various processes that differ from one another that are being performed by the business on a daily basis. So, all the processes that are automated should integrate seamlessly with all the existing processes. This integration should be carried out at various levels and all these processes should work smoothly with the existing environment.
Training the Staff
For efficient functioning of business processes the staff must have a complete understanding of the complete workflow. The better they know the process, the better they will have the capability to perform the same. Automation is not only about becoming digital, it involves a larger picture of simplifying processes, improving efficiency, and streamline the entire business.
Apt reasons why Automation is beneficial for manufacturers
Reducing operational cost
Automation reduces cost and increases profitability. As less human interference and assistance is required, there it eliminates the need of appointing additional professionals for a work type that can be automated. Automation does make processes related to accounting, payments, employee management and resource handling much efficient.
Enforce governance
Automation is an exceptional way to implement governance in the business. Every task that an automated process completes should essentially be documented. This ensures that managers have clear logs about what was done, how much time the process took, and when it was done. As stated above, automation reduces process error and speeds up the entire process as well.
An easy way to get started with automation
A workflow management tool is an excellent way to get started with automation. The tool/software helps business create, optimize and streamline the entire workforce. This implementation not only ensures actionable workforce management but also automates, monitors, and gets real-time updates for managers.
Start with back office
While organizations may fail to figure out where to start with automation, the best start is automating processes from the back office. Everything right from creating the task schedules to manianting the resources report, backoffice is everything about managing huge chunks of data on a daily basis. Through automation all these processes are easy to perform, execute, and streamline as well.
Automate the billing process afterwards
A wide range of software can be utilized for automating the billing process also. As manual process is prone to process error, manufacturers can’t take this risk and the best way to not commit error is to automate the entire billing process. It will take less time, will eliminate the error completely, and keep the document related to billing stored safely in the system.
Try predictive maintenance in different automation scenarios
Predictive maintenance in industry automation ensures optimum utilization of assets and conditional monitoring of data. Predictive maintenance could also play an important role in detecting problems while resource scheduling and quality inspections.
Apart from these benefits, predictive maintenance could be the best tool for timely repair of machines, eliminating hazardous event occurrence, improving equipment efficiency, and meeting productive goals. Predictive maintenance also contributes to reducing overall cost of maintenance.
The bottomline
Automation when implemented correctly helps increase the efficiency and accuracy of business processes. Employees can thus spend their valuable time on important proposals without worrying about other time-consuming tasks. As these tasks are being automated, the processes will never be performed with error, will help with increased productivity, and ensure timely service delivery.
Many field service management software companies are also working on developing tools to automate the field workforce.
Facebook was founded in 2004. In the 16 years since the site was launched, social media has played a prominent role in modern marketing. Over 3.8 billion people around the world use social media websites, so shrewd marketers leverage prominent social media sites to expand their reach. The benefits are astounding. One MarketingSherpa study found that the average ROI of social media marketing is 95%.
However, social media is not a foolproof approach to success in business. You need to be diligent with your efforts. You should also be aware of the following advantages and disadvantages of social media marketing.
Advantages of social media marketing
There are numerous reasons marketers are using social media to appeal to the customers. Some of the biggest advantages are listed below.
Excellent conversion rates for e-commerce
Social media users are highly likely to purchase products. One survey found 54% of customers research products on social media before they choose to purchase them. Conversion rates are especially high for targeting social media users actively searching for products, such as those using the Pinterest search engine. Other studies found that 83% of Pinterest users made a purchase after looking at content there and 72% use the site to decide what to purchase off-line.
Excellent Reach
You can reach the vast majority of the population in developed economies through social media. Recent data shows 68% of adults in the United States are on Facebook. An even higher percentage of adults are on social media sites in general, after counting YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram and other platforms.
The popularity of social media also offers many opportunities for scalability. Unlike smaller platforms, content on social media doesn’t burn out very quickly. Marketers using sites like BuySellAds have noticed that their ROI ends up dropping very sharply after too many returning visitors kept seeing their advertisements. Social media content doesn’t fizzle nearly as quickly, because there is such a deep user base.
Also, the heterogeneity of social media websites makes it easy for marketers to find new opportunities in different markets. A marketer might have success targeting men between the ages of 18 and 34. They could easily try reaching females in the same age group, because an approximately equal number of them are on social media and the targeting capabilities of most sites is very similar. They could also explore markets in other countries, since social media is used by websites all over the world.
Excellent satisfaction among marketers
Marketers have been using social media for over a decade. The majority of marketers have found that it is highly effective for meeting their goals. One recent poll showed that 73% of marketers are satisfied with the results.
The reason that social media is so effective for marketing is that brands have a wide range of options. They can use social media for both performance and brand marketing. They can also easily pair their preferred social networking site with the demographics of the customers they are focusing on. For example, brands that are targeting B2B companies can use LinkedIn or SlideShare. Companies that are promoting products and services to female customers can realize high returns by promoting content on Pinterest, since 70% of the audience is women there.
Excellent customer satisfaction through direct engagement
Smart companies understand that customers want to engage with them on social media. They realize that social media isn’t just a platform to share content and make highly promotional statements about their brand.
The real benefit of social media is that customers can engage with their favorite brands on a much more personal level. If they want to learn more about a product, they can only take up so much time of a customer service representative by sending emails or making phone calls. Those mediums simply are not meant to be used for regular conversations.
Social media is a different animal. It was specifically designed to facilitate discussions between users, which includes conversations between brands and their favorite customers. Smart brands use social media to answer customer questions in detail and share comments and even jokes.
Disadvantages of using social media
Social media marketing can be incredibly effective for most marketers. However, there are some unfortunate downsides to using it as well. Some of these drawbacks are listed below.
Shutterstock Licensed Image – By yanatul
Intense competition
Back in 2010, building a successful social media strategy was much easier. Some marketers were able to create $1,000 a day business models without even creating their own products. They would launch social media ads to promote dropshipping and affiliate marketing products.
This has become a lot more difficult in recent years. The biggest reason is that competition is becoming steeper.
This certainly doesn’t mean that social media marketing is no longer viable. On the contrary, it is as affective as it has ever been. However, brands have to compensate for rising costs due to higher competition with more innovative business models. Simplistic CPA marketing funnels simply aren’t likely to cut it anymore.
Frustrating algorithm changes
In 2016, Facebook unveiled a major new algorithm change. This change meant that publications with shorter form content had a more difficult time getting visibility. Many of these publishers were doing quite well before and had very engaging business models. The algorithm change didn’t make much sense from this perspective, but it still crippled some brands.
Facebook has since made other algorithm changes in recent years. The website’s new changes have made it much more difficult for organic content to gain traction. Websites generally need to commit to paying for visibility.
Facebook is not the only social media site that has created challenges with algorithm changes. Pinterest has released a number of new changes over the last few years as well. Their biggest change was the introduction of a new search engine, which shifted the emphasis from favoring brands with large follower count to favoring brands with engaging content. New machine learning algorithms have giving preference to content curators that produce visuals that are likely to be actively shared and engaged with.
Marketers need to regularly update their strategies to reflect new algorithm updates. Those that failed to evolve with these changes will be left behind.
Stricter policies
Most social media platforms are becoming less tolerant of the content and advertisements they are willing to accept. Facebook made some major changes a few years ago, when they all but banned advertisements for dating websites. Many marketers were making bank promoting dating sites, but found their advertising accounts were banned overnight. Companies promoting cryptocurrencies and other vaguely controversial products also found that Facebook was no longer accepting their ads.
Poorly thought out strategies can backfire very quickly
Social media is a double edge sword for marketers. On the one hand, smart marketers can see impressive results rather quickly. They can see results in the form of new sales and leads.
Unfortunately, poorly executed social media strategies can work just as quickly. Bad social media messages or offensive content can cause lasting damage virtually overnight.
Deciphering the Mysteries of Social Media Marketing
In order to appreciate the benefits and drawbacks of social media marketing, you should take some time to understand the nature of different social networks. There are specific focuses of each of the different social networks, so they have little or no competition with each other.
XING and LinkedIn are B2B networks, whereby XING is more oriented towards the German area and LinkedIn enables international contacts.
Instagram and Pinterest are social networks that focus on images. These two networks seem to have the greatest overlaps with user demographics.
Whatsapp and Snapchat are messenger services. Snapchat is especially popular with younger people, because the messages are deleted after a short time.
Twitter is a social network where the number of characters for tweets is limited to 140 characters. However, tests with 280 characters are also running. Twitter is used in the German-speaking world more in the B2B environment, while internationally it is used by broad sections of society.
The situation is similar with Google+. Google’s social networking site was once supposed to become the big competitor to Facebook, but it has by no means achieved the same relevance as Facebook. At Google+ you can find some niches or industries that exchange with each other.
Facebook is by far the most relevant social network worldwide.
Youtube is a video search engine and social network for videos combined. Youtube is operated by Google and is considered the second largest search engine after Google.
The future of social networks seems to belong to all-round platforms such as weChat, which combine messenger functionalities with the features of classic social networks.
Social media has both strong pros and cons
There are countless benefits of using social media marketing. However, there are some downsides as well. Marketers need to understand the nature of these platforms and use them appropriately. You can see much higher benefits from using the right networks and crafting content that resonates with your target demographic.
The biggest reason your employees need you to build a strong brand image is that their financial stability depends on it. You can’t attract a steady stream of paying customers with a weak brand. This obviously threatens the financial stability of your employees, since you can’t pay them without a steady stream of revenue.
Building a stronger brand image will not only ensure you can meet your contractual payment obligations to them, but it also means that you can provide better paying opportunities in the future. As your company brand value appreciates, you can bring in higher paying clients. This makes it easier for you to offer raises across the board. If you offer stock options to your employees, their net worth will increase as well.
More pride and prestige
Money isn’t the only reason people want to work for a company. They want to work somewhere they can be proud of. They want to be able to tell their friends and family and strangers they meet at cocktail parties that they work for well-known company that is making a difference. Do you think people would rather tell somebody that they have a manager position at Google or are working in a garage in their friend’s dad‘s basement?
You don’t need to necessarily grow your brand to become the next Amazon or Google. However, you want to at least create a strong brand image that your employees will be proud to boast about.
Other employment opportunities
Every business is going to have some degree of turnover. This isn’t something that should hurt your ego. Employees that leave are not necessarily going to defect to your competitors either. Some people are going to want to change careers has their interests change.
Whatever the reason that somebody chooses to seek other employment options, you have a duty to help them get off on the right foot. If you build a strong brand image, they will have a much easier time getting a foot in the door with another company.
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How do You Build a Strong Brand Image for Your Employees?
There are a number of things that you need to do to create a strong brand image. Here are a few.
Create a strong logo and visual appearance
I can’t overemphasize the importance of a good logo. It can make or break your brand image. Designhill has a great logo generator that lets you choose from thousands of preloaded images and create highly detailed logos.
Be careful about underpricing
Choosing the right pricing strategy is essential for any brand. It is tempting to offer low prices to attract more customers. However, charging low prices can make it difficult to generate the capital needed to grow your business, unless you have a large sales volume. Make sure you are realistic about the depth of the market and set prices accordingly.
Deliver consistent value to every customer
Your brand image hinges on your reputation more than anything else. Focus on consistently delivering the same high-quality service to every customer that you made. Don’t cut corners just because a customer is ordering less than another. Word will get out.
