Video marketing can be an overwhelming concept for small businesses and startups. It will require a considerable investment, but will it be worth it? Some business owners might think that video marketing is exclusive to established businesses, but this is not true. In fact, small businesses stand to benefit the most from this type of marketing content.
The Benefits of Video Marketing
Video marketing has always been an effective way to target a specific audience. It started at the dawn of television, and it still is an excellent way to market your business in today’s digital world. Videos in digital ads today are more relevant and catchier, and they can help boost your business in the following ways:
Better Way to Acquire Information
People today have shorter attention spans and less patience than previous generations. They grew up in a time of instant gratification. If choosing between reading an article that will take at least ten minutes or watching a two-minute video about a product, most people will choose the video. That is how effective and impactful videos are.
Visual Support
Your videos can act as additional visual support for your existing marketing materials. You can start working with your current materials and create engaging video content that will capture your audience’s attention while strengthening your brand awareness.
Encourage Conversion and Boost Your Sales
Since videos are highly engaging content, they can help boost your sales. Companies that add product videos to their landing pages can increase their conversions by up to 80 percent. Videos are powerful marketing tools. When done right, they can grow your sales.
Help Promote Trust
The best thing about videos is how they communicate emotions so effectively. Successfully creating an emotional bond with your target audience is one of the key factors in earning their trust. Trust is never easy to get or instill in your potential customers, but it can create wonders for your brand once you have it.
If you make video materials for your brand, you can try shooting interviews, testimonials, and behind-the-scenes videos to make your brand more real and relatable. These are also effective ways to showcase the positive thoughts that current customers or employees think about your brand or company. Having real people talk about an organization, a product, or a service, makes it more authentic and attractive.
You can also make engaging content to educate or wow your viewers. Seeing how a product works, for example, will give them a clearer understanding of what it does, and it will help inform their decision to buy.
Not Everyone Is Doing It
Video marketing is a highly effective marketing tool, but not everyone is using it yet. Utilize this to your advantage, and be one of the firsts in your industry to create video content. Let this be your edge over your competitors.
Shareable With Extensive Reach
Another great thing about video content is how easy it is to share them with other people. You can upload them on your social media platforms, and once it captures people’s attention, your network will do the sharing for you. As a result, you will have better chances of reaching different audiences without relying on paid ads. Moreover, videos give you better access to mobile viewers, who comprise the majority of online users today.
Conclusion
When companies and brands want to make big names for themselves, they make viral video ads. That is how powerful, fast, and massive video marketing’s reach and impact are. With the right strategy and team, you can bring your small business to the next level using quality video materials.
Do you need professional video marketing services ? We can help you in various ways, from video production and editing to strategy creation and development. Contact us today to learn how we can help you.
Animation is more than just the cartoons and films. Today animation has evolved so brilliantly that it can influence the return on investment of businesses.
Few of us have to consciously remind ourselves that animation today is more than mere entertainment. We were probably introduced to animation in its nascent stage and somehow have forgotten that those very things are actually serious stuff today. Business tools to boost your marketing and branding.
In case you’re one of them, this article is a great way to catch up on where animation is as of today. What are the types and why businesses across industries are employing them to their advantage?
Animation today
What started as multiple hand-drawn frames were replaced by the computer revolution making it less tedious and time-consuming. It wasn’t until later that CGI totally changed animation as we know it. With technology, animation is come to be known as an “intricate relationship between artwork and technology.” Its reach made endless penetrating every industry possible. We now have advanced to a stage making possible architectural visualizations and virtual tours, mechanical designs that cut development costs and educational tools for health care and learning.
The different types of animation
There are genres of animation that can be used by businesses based on factors like reach, audience profile, concept and medium. Although listed in order of their evolvement, they also exist as standalone preferences today.
Traditional animation – Sequential hand-sketches screened quickly to create an illusion of movement, are used by ad agencies today to test commercials before production.
2D animation – This is very similar to traditional animation but uses computerized software to simulate a 2-dimensional motion.
3D computer animation (CGI)– A more realistic, 3-dimensional look that is created with computer generated images to create an animation.
Motion graphics – These are often used for multimedia projects, where texts or images are creatively given the illusion of motion. Example: animated logos, movie opening titles.
Stop motion – Photographs of objects taken in sequential different positions, that when played create an illusion of movement.
Benefits of using animation for your business
Quick message delivery
You getting time to read this is great! But, it’s rare. That’s the world we’re living in. Animation in the form of stop motion or micro-videos are a great way to deal with the instant-demand these days. These six-second videos can be used to highlight unique selling features of a new product, app or service. There is no better way to explain complex features than with visuals that keep the technicalities at bay. Animation can bring life to the product and keep audiences engaged with simple and personalized visuals for better conceptualization.
Educate while you entertain
In a high-stress world, there is a universal craving for information in its most simple form. When this can be presented in the form of entertainment, then you’ve got the crowd all ears. Animations allow for easy processing of information without having to deal with the technical jargon and strain their minds. With social media trending, news spreads like wild fire. The interactive nature of social media has its advantages when it comes to micro-videos or campaigns. Remember, visitors to social media are all in for entertainment and these videos are just ideal.
Transfer the emotion
Animation is a great way to emotionally connect with your audience. Almost everyone is fascinated by a make-believe world that’s a factor that easily keeps viewers engaged. These animated videos can be commercials or campaigns that drive the point straight home even in the absence of text and dialogues. That’s the beauty of animation. The feeling of ‘being sold to’ is the last thing viewers experience when visually engaged with an animated image or object. Say, employing a friendly faced mascot to run your campaigns which can definitely boost brand awareness and promotion.
Show off your personality
So what’s so unique about your business? The benefits of signing up for your services? Who are your clients?
These are some of the questions that are often thrown at businesses. When first impressions matter the most, businesses are always in a tussle to deliver their stories in a nutshell considering optimization on prospective clients’ allotted time. With animation, there is a lot of scope to show your personality. Perceptions, ideas and concepts are portrayed when words may fail.
Influence buying decisions
Animation videos or mascots certainly are one of the strongest influencers in a consumer’s purchase decision due to the power of association. A simple example we all can relate to is ‘Cornelious’, the Corn Flakes Rooster. A simple concept of waking up to cornflakes and why it would make an ideal breakfast. These are all a boost to not just branding but assist consumers to convert. Needless to say, a familiar brand gets preference in terms of choice. The more viewers are exposed to these ads the better the promotion. The greatest strength of animation is its self-sufficiency when it comes to text or language; the universal language spoken by this creative advertising tool speaks volumes.
Boost search rankings
Videos and images are the life of any page. Animations are all the more fun, increasing time on page and giving engagement a boost. The resulting improvement in analytics signals search engines of users finding website content relevant and these positives ultimately have an impact on search rankings.
Easy share
Animations are fun. They have an element of surprise that make users want to share with their friends or group. The likes and shares on these videos facilitate a long lasting impression and identity. While these are embedded on video platforms and showcased on business websites, they could be search optimized and bring in additional traffic from video platforms like YouTube, vimeo and other social media platforms.
Animation is all about creativity. There is no limit. Guaranteed is a branding boost but not just that, you’re headed to win a lot of hearts and have a whole lot of eyes glued.
Conclusion
The importance of animation in business promotions cannot be over emphasize in today’s business world, it’s either you evolve and follow the trend or your competitors will kick you out of business. So why not contact kennysoft STUDIOs lets help you engage new audience, grow brand visibility online, improve social engagement and enhance conversion rates through video marketing.
Video marketing can be an overwhelming concept for small businesses and startups. It will require a considerable investment, but will it be worth it? Some business owners might think that video marketing is exclusive to established businesses, but this is not true. In fact, small businesses stand to benefit the most from this type of marketing content.
The Benefits of Video Marketing
Video marketing has always been an effective way to target a specific audience. It started at the dawn of television, and it still is an excellent way to market your business in today’s digital world. Videos in digital ads today are more relevant and catchier, and they can help boost your business in the following ways:
Better Way to Acquire Information
People today have shorter attention spans and less patience than previous generations. They grew up in a time of instant gratification. If choosing between reading an article that will take at least ten minutes or watching a two-minute video about a product, most people will choose the video. That is how effective and impactful videos are.
Visual Support
Your videos can act as additional visual support for your existing marketing materials. You can start working with your current materials and create engaging video content that will capture your audience’s attention while strengthening your brand awareness.
Encourage Conversion and Boost Your Sales
Since videos are highly engaging content, they can help boost your sales. Companies that add product videos to their landing pages can increase their conversions by up to 80 percent. Videos are powerful marketing tools. When done right, they can grow your sales.
Help Promote Trust
The best thing about videos is how they communicate emotions so effectively. Successfully creating an emotional bond with your target audience is one of the key factors in earning their trust. Trust is never easy to get or instill in your potential customers, but it can create wonders for your brand once you have it.
If you make video materials for your brand, you can try shooting interviews, testimonials, and behind-the-scenes videos to make your brand more real and relatable. These are also effective ways to showcase the positive thoughts that current customers or employees think about your brand or company. Having real people talk about an organization, a product, or a service, makes it more authentic and attractive.
You can also make engaging content to educate or wow your viewers. Seeing how a product works, for example, will give them a clearer understanding of what it does, and it will help inform their decision to buy.
Not Everyone Is Doing It
Video marketing is a highly effective marketing tool, but not everyone is using it yet. Utilize this to your advantage, and be one of the firsts in your industry to create video content. Let this be your edge over your competitors.
Shareable With Extensive Reach
Another great thing about video content is how easy it is to share them with other people. You can upload them on your social media platforms, and once it captures people’s attention, your network will do the sharing for you. As a result, you will have better chances of reaching different audiences without relying on paid ads. Moreover, videos give you better access to mobile viewers, who comprise the majority of online users today.
Conclusion
When companies and brands want to make big names for themselves, they make viral video ads. That is how powerful, fast, and massive video marketing’s reach and impact are. With the right strategy and team, you can bring your small business to the next level using quality video materials.
Do you need professional video marketing services ? We can help you in various ways, from video production and editing to strategy creation and development. Contact us today to learn how we can help you.
Poor time management is something that is always seen with creatives and many small businesses especially here in Nigeria where everything is demanding for time from traffic jams to business meetings and a whole lot more.
What is poor time management?
Poor Time management is the inability of planning and exercising conscious control of the time spent on specific activities to work smarter than harder.
As creatives and small business owners if you don’t manage your time property it will result into poor time management and the implications of poor time management are enormous and they include.
Procrastination
Procrastination is the most obvious result of poor time management. Creatives or small business owners who don’t have control over their time end up letting tasks sit until the last minute – and then they feel a lot of stress when they try to play catch up. If you’ve let too many tasks sit, you might miss deadlines entirely.
Lack Of Priorities and Focus
The biggest single time-management problem for most people is their lack of priorities and focus. It’s even worse when there aren’t clear goals to follow. If a creative or small business owner allows themselves to be distracted by numerous unimportant tasks, they can end up wasting a lot of time. For example, getting distracted by every new email or starting one task after another without finishing anything.
Most creatives have more work to do than could be completed in one day or even one week. If you don’t know how to effectively manage your time, you can rapidly start to feel overwhelmed. If that’s happening to you, the best thing you can do is focus on the one most important task you have.
Then, you can feel like you have achieved something and met a deadline. However, you’ll most likely need to leap straight into the next crisis to meet another deadline, never having enough time to get ahead of the curve. Getting proactive about your work can greatly help you meet all your deadlines early.
Sometimes the issue is that a lot of creatives and small business owners won’t delegate other tasks that they really should they want to do everything their self. Small business owners, in particular, can be guilty of this. You must delegate when appropriate. Then you can focus on the tasks where you can add the most value. This results in higher quality work from everyone involved.
Missed Deadlines
If you are currently exhibiting poor time management skills, you will likely miss deadlines. This can have drastic effects on your work performance. It will also affect many of your colleagues who may suffer from the fallout. Perhaps you are late for meetings, miss calls, or anything else that delays work getting done. This affects much more than just you and your role. Anyone who is always unprepared can cause issues for everyone else. It wastes the time of people who have prepared their own work. Make sure you do anything in your power to not miss deadlines.
Unprofessionalism
Missed deadlines show that there is a serious lack of respect and professionalism. This will surely impact the career of the person in question. It can also act as a demotivator for the team because no one wants to put the work in only to fail because of someone else. This effect is worsened if the person with poor time management is their manager. More widely, unprofessionalism can lower the good reputation of the organization. Any client would be upset if you missed a deadline related to their project.
Financial Implications
Deadlines being missed can come at a huge cost for the company. Without proper time management training, deadlines may be missed time and time again. As an example, if you create products for a shipment leaving the next day, the shipment goes whether or not you’ve filled it up. The cost of this can be massive. These conflicts can make your client relationships suffer as well as you having to lose out on profit.
Damaged Customer Relationships
One of the biggest time management problems is that when we produce low quality work at the last minute, our clients are sure to notice. They will no longer be happy with the service and may choose to go with another provider.
This loses the company money but also tarnishes its reputation. It’s even worse when you have contracts with the client, but it includes a service level agreement. If you don’t meet this, you may have to pay.
Ending Thoughts on poor time management
We spend countless hours over our lives doing things that are of little benefit to us. If you could add this time up and see how many hours of this you waste each month, you would be shocked.
Time management issues can create countless conflicts in business. Lost finances, negative relationships, and missing deadlines are a serious matter.
A creative or small business owner with poor time management may end up losing jobs.
It’s not all bad news, however!
Whether we’re talking about creatives or small business owners, time management can be helped by some fantastic software.
Balancing delivery end exceeding customer expectations is something a lot of creatives find difficult in doing, they make the mistake of over promising and under delivery. They forget that Managing customer expectations results in positive returns for both businesses and customers alike. Creatives are able to meet the needs of their customers and customers take away a pleasant experience. That’s how important balancing delivery and exceeding customer expectation are but why do creatives sometimes fail to this simple hack.
To begin with let’s define what a customer expectation is: Customer expectation can be defined as the perceived value or benefits that the clients look for while purchasing products or services.
What are the different types of customer expectation?
Implicit expectations – are based on business performance and formed by experiences such as comparison with the products or services of the competitors.
Explicit expectations – refers to well-identified product performance standards, quality of the product, and services rendered by any company.
Interpersonal expectations – reflect the relationship between a customer and brand across the customer lifecycle.
Static performance expectations – refer to the front-facing elements of your brand such as accessibility, customization, dependability, etc.
Key factors that contribute to poor customer expectation
A critical as managing client expectations it’s very important in understanding the factors that can influence poor customer expectation. Because Unable to meet consumers’ standards translate to low conversions and customer retention rates.
Here are some key factors that contributes to poor customer expectation.
Previous experience with other brands – The previous experience with your competitors can shape client expectations from you. They might model their preferences based on what other brands can do for them. If you fail to outshine your competitors, you can not win your customers.
Poor Communication strategy – What you communicate to the customers, through support or marketing channels shapes their expectations. And the way you communicate pertains to your customer service. So, focus on disseminating accurate information and the way you interact as it impacts your overall brand image.
Customer reviews and feedback – Feedbacks and reviews greatly influence the brand image and reputation. What your customers speak about you creates your brand image. By keeping high-quality consistent performance-focused, you should take your online reputation management seriously.
How to manage and exceed customer expectation
Understanding customer needs and exceeding their expectation are becoming table stakes for creatives to compete. Let us discuss the top ways you can manage the list of customer expectation.
1. Engage customers consistently across multiple touch-points
Customers view contextualized engagement and seamless transitions between different communication channels. If the creative engage their customers based on earlier interactions, it could act as a winning formula.
Creatives that follow the omnichannel communication strategy have witnessed a significant 89% increase in retention and a 9.5% year-over-year increase in annual revenue.
Customers expect businesses to be active across multiple channels like the web, social media, email, mobile devices, etc. Maintaining consistency among every channel improves the customer experience that impacts brand reputation positively. So, break your silos and manage your customer expectation by following the tips below.
Identify all the channels that customers choose to reach out to your business.
Unify all your customer conversations at a single place to get a better understanding of your customer journey.
Use the insights to engage your customers throughout their journey across all touchpoints.
As a business, having a strong omnichannel customer service strategy is critical to have a unified view of your customers and be able to take necessary actions before they churn.
Key takeaways
You can map your customer journey to understand their behaviour and know the areas where they need your assistance. You can offer proactive assistance across the behaviour stages via the right channels such as live chat, chatbot.
You can acquire customer feedback and improve your support process to learn and exceed your customer expectations.
Following an omni channel approach reduces the number of customer complaints as you can reach out to them across various channels.
2. Provide faster real time solutions 24×7
Real time engagement is what every customer expects when they approach a brand. Most of the customers leave frustrated if they fail to receive instant support.
The core idea behind real-time customer engagement is the ability to recognize and interact with your customers promptly and cadence that matters to them. InContact study found that customers are satisfied and positive with proactive customer service.
Live chat software empowers the agents to proactively engage with customers and offer them the right solutions. You can also use visual engagement tools like video & voice chat and co-browsing solutions, to make the conversation effective and offer faster solutions. The live customer engagement tools ensure faster resolution in the first touchpoint.
Chatbots are the best solution to automate the repetitive business tasks to engage customers with instant answers 24×7. They are the best way of managing customer expectations when the customers’ queries are simple or your support team is busy or not available. Bots can be easily scalable when there is a sudden rise in traffic.
Key takeaways
You can use live chat software to gain valuable insights about customers’ profiles and trigger the right message at the right time to deliver the best customer service experience.
With the help of customer engagement, collaborate with your customers in real time and deliver faster solutions in the first contact.
Deploy chatbots to engage customers 24×7, handle the FAQs, and increase customer satisfaction. This reduces the number of tickets and improves team productivity
You can provide hybrid support to your customers. Bots will handle general queries and complex queries will be transferred for humanized support.
3. Keep your communication transparent
Customers expect transparent communication. Businesses lose potential customers because they fail to implement transparency practices.
Being transparent is good not only for your customers but also for your business. In addition to attracting new customers, transparency allows you to better serve your existing ones, ensuring they stick with you. Here’s how transparency has helped our business:
Build a successful business – Being more open about your products, prices, terms and conditions will set you up for success. Potential customers respond well to straightforward talk about what we can and can’t do for them.
Increase your brand value – Becoming more transparent can improve your business’s efficiency. By spending time talking about your customers’ concerns and embellishing your results, you can save time for more productive work.
Build trust and loyalty – The trust that you build with your customers is invaluable. Transparency is a key way of creating trust because it helps eliminate any suspicions or anxieties your customers might have about the value of what you’re offering.
Key takeaways
You should propel authentic information about your product or services to avoid future confusion among customers.
Make sure that you don’t make fake commitments and set customer expectations that will break their trust and loyalty.
You should know your brand offers and discounts prior to offering customers to maintain brand efficiency.
4. Focus to cultivate customer loyalty
Customers always demand high levels of customer service. Such customer service expectations are what ultimately inform their level of satisfaction, leaving brands with a difficult question: how can you possibly meet your customers’ needs while staying ahead of the competition? The answer is customer loyalty.
PR Newswire says that the loyalty management market will grow from $1.4 Billion in 2015 to $4.0 Billion by 2021. Businesses are building strategies in focus to increase customer loyalty
Loyalty is the perfect tool for managing, and exceeding customer expectations with every purchase. But in order to address them with loyalty, it is important to understand the types of customer expectation and what they mean in the context of retention and reward marketing.
Key takeaways
Loyal customers have a positive impact on business recommending your brand to friends and family with good word of mouth.
When customers are satisfied, they become loyal and have higher customer lifetime value.
5. Collect customer feedback
As per the HubSpot study, “A full 42% of companies don’t survey their customers or collect feedback.” Eventually, these companies fail to understand customer expectations. Customer feedback is vital for all businesses to get an overall transparent performance picture and improve your products and services.
Once you understand what customers need, it becomes relatively easy to provide those features in your product. It also becomes relatively easy to retain customers — since they won’t have to go elsewhere when you’re doing what they expect from you.
So yes, feedback is crucial.
Customer feedback helps to measure customer satisfaction. There is a close connection between customer satisfaction and business performance. Therefore, you need to make sure your customers are happy with your products and services.
Naturally, the best way to find out if you meet their expectations is by their feedback. By using CSAT and NPS surveys and ratings you can easily measure the satisfaction level and consequently predict your company’s financial condition in the future.
Key takeaways
Customers expect creatives to respond to their feedback promptly, but if the time gap is slightly, they churn and talk negatively about your brand.
By asking customer feedback, you communicate that their opinion is important to you. You involve them in shaping your business so they feel more attached to your company. This is the best way to gain valuable brand ambassadors who will spread positive word-of-mouth for you.
6. Meet your customer expectation by going the extra mile
Basically, to go the extra mile comes down to doing more than is expected by the customers, trying a little harder, and going above the norm. And needless to say, that excellent customer service is a key attribute that many customers value more than the price or quality of the product.
For example, it’s the extra time a sales agent spends helping customers to make the right selection or the customer support rep who takes a few minutes extra to ensure you have all of your questions answered and won’t need to call back.
What can you do to show you value your customers? Here are some ways you can make your customers feel valued or important.
Try to know your customers and identify their needs. Customers love the personalization and attention you give them.
Implement the feedback collected from customers and offer improved products or services that align their expectations.
Give promotional offers and discounts with their purchase.
Going the extra mile will not only result in a much happier customer, but it can also go a long way in terms of keeping your business growing as well as staying on their radar for future opportunities and business.
Perfect example on how to exceed customer expectation answers
Kennysoft STUDIOs is known for going the extra mile to fulfil customer expectations and delight them. Once a customer orders for a video or animation production service, Kennysoft STUDIOs does not only produce the video for the customer but go further in understanding what the video will be used and then create a video marketing strategy for the client at no extra cost.
7. Use social media to understand customer expectation
Gartner studies say “Businesses that do not respond to social media messages encounter a 15% increase in customer churn.”
Social media has become one of the most preferred platforms by customers for instant assistance. According to Insights Guide Facebook reported that more than 1 billion messages are sent from customers to businesses, every year.
Practice social listening to monitor social conversations related to your brand. By actively listening to the conversations, you can understand their expectations and behaviour. You can manage customer expectations and build good relationships with them. You can promptly respond to customer service expectations on social media.
It encourages customers to spend more with the company. Your business is able to gain a competitive advantage and make your business stand out of the box.
Key takeaways
Practicing social media listening helps you to understand customer service psychology that further helps to know customer needs and wants.
Identifying customer needs empowers you to serve them better and boost customer satisfaction.
8. Conduct market research
Conducting market research is a great way of identifying potential customers. Once you know your target audience you can plan how to exceed their expectations. The more you know about your customers, it helps you define your brand positioning around their expectations.
Understanding customer’s overall can benefit your business to deliver better customer service and build long-lasting relationships.
When you identify your customer expectation you can:
Offer prompt solutions – Knowing what customer expects from you helps to deliver prompt and effective support.
Enhance overall product – Customer research helps to understand the motives behind the buying process of the customers and improve on grey areas to create an effective USP.
Making an effort for market research is worth it because it provides you insights on so many questions like – who are the potential customers, what they buy, why they buy it etc. Further, the research can help you to develop a more detailed picture of them and understand how to target them.
Key takeaways
Research can help you to learn your customer expectation across your industry. It is very important to collect the core details from your customers through regular communication and deliver service matching their expectations.
You can use CAST and NPS surveys to measure your customer satisfaction with the existing business products and services. Based on the answers you can tailor your product to your client expectations.
9. Keep your customers engaged
Many creatives fail in meeting the expectation of keeping them updated and follow up with them. This can be frustrating and end up customers leaving you and negatively advocating about you.
They do so because they feel that you do not care for them and prefer silently leaving your brand. This might negatively impact your brand.
Keeping your customers up to date and making follow-ups show your care towards them and makes them feel an integral part of your business. This develops loyalty in your customers and they eventually become your best brand advocates.
Key takeaways
Make sure you provide your customers with an estimated time to reply back to keep customers informed.
Follow up with your customers once the issue is resolved to make sure they are satisfied with the solution or not.
10. Proactive handling of customer complaints
The web enables customers to share their feedback in multiple channels such as forums, social media networks, and more. This indicates that you need to get proactive in handling customer complaints.
You can categorize the frequently reported complaints or analyse what sort of problem the customers might encounter and based on that you can prepare solutions beforehand. The solutions can be in various forms such as:
Support content
How-to videos
FAQs
Tutorials
Key takeaways
You should never ignore your customer complaints. When you receive complaints from customers, categorize them, and share them with the relevant team or department to work on to resolve it as soon as possible.
As you welcome customer appreciation, have a similar attitude to the complaints as they are the way to build a better product and brand.
Conclusion
Balancing Delivery and exceeding Customer expectation have a profound impact on every creative business and businesses generally. It implies across the whole organization in its own way. Being customer-centric is the best way of managing clients’ expectations. Once you plan and understand what your target audience expects, it becomes easy to meet and exceed them.
