Okay, so you invested in all these forms of visual content to promote your brand. What do you do next?
Visual Content
Visual content is your best choice, being the most efficient and the most widespread form of online content. And this is for a reason – studies say that people remember only 20% of what they hear, 30% of what they see and 70% of what they hear and see at the same time. Also, visual content is favored by the algorithms behind social media platforms. In 2019, 80% of internet traffic came from watching videos. We also know that 63% of social media is made of images.
If these were only entertainment forms before, now they are critical components, especially in business- we need videos to promote and sell products, ideas, and values.
Videos are, among others, the most efficient way of humanizing brands. Videos add a face and a personality to the brand. It can be the face of an employee, the CEO or just a happy customer, depending on what message you want to spread. People are social beings and they get along with humans or even buy from them.
Of course, that doesn’t mean you always have to “sell”. Do you want to simply tell them something or educate them on a matter? You can do it through video. Do you want to show that “transparency” is a big part of your brand? Just show them what’s behind the scenes. People love it.
Videos can also get viral fairly easily. A video that’s professionally put together, with an easy-to-understand message, can get in from of thousands of internet users in a short time. After that, they are just one step away from buying from you.
Investing in visual promotional video content is a long term investment, the same as investing in their high quality. This study says that 62% of viewers get a bad impression of a brand that uses low-quality videos, and 23% of them decide not to buy, after watching such a video. These videos can be the first impression for a potential client și think thoroughly about what you want to say and to whom.
Also, you can send these messages inside your company, to ensure that you maintain a strong relationship with your employees and partners. You can make sure that you all share the same values and that they spread them outside of the company, through Word of Mouth. Your employees can be the most credible source for someone who wants to buy from you so if your employees can say good things, then you are winning.
Advertising – Now and then
Before, there weren’t many options – you could promote your brand on TV, Radio, and Billboards and that was possible only with pretty big budgets.
Also, they weren’t the most efficient ways because it was almost impossible to properly measure the success of a campaign and they weren’t the most credible ways to promote your brand, either.
Now though, you have lots of possibilities. Other than all sorts of independent companies and locations that can work as your partners for distributing video content, you also have access to all social media platforms.
Social Media
The biggest quality of social media is that you can target your audience based on segmentation (anything you can imagine – from their age, jobs, interests, all the way to their monthly income) and you can communicate with them when they are willing to listen to you.
In November 2019, on Facebook, in Romania, you could get to the screens of 10 million users of all ages, which were making about one million posts and were leaving 6 million comments. On Instagram, you could get to 1 million users and on Youtube, to almost 900 thousands of users who were making about 2 million comments on videos. And the numbers keep growing. Let’s take a closer look at the platforms you can use to efficiently communicate with your target audience:
On Facebook, you can make ads for promoting your page, your posts or your website. You can target customers based on their location, demographics (age, sex, even marriage status if it matters to you) and a lot of other information available on their profile – interests, hobbies, all the way to their job title and job seniority.
Being a Facebook-owned platform, the targeting criteria is the same. The difference is in content. Because it is a platform exclusive for photos and videos, you have to make sure that you deliver the highest-quality content. Also, on Instagram, you find a quite younger audience while on Facebook you can find people of all ages nowadays.
Same as Instagram, being a platform specialized in one type of content, that is video, it is really important to focus on its quality and the way in which the message is communicated in the relatively short time you have available.
LinkedIn is the most used platform in B2B (business to business) communication. This doesn’t mean that you cannot communicate with individuals, no. Being a platform that focuses on their professional life, you can target them based on the field in which they work or the company they work for. You can also target them based on their work title and their professional interests.
What should you do next?
Now that you’ve seen how each platform works and the benefits it has, I wouldn’t recommend you to start promoting your content by yourself, not to mention the creation of content. Even though the platforms offer you all this information, they won’t tell you what to do with it and how to use it to make a profit. Basically, they can take your money without offering you anything.
This is why there are specialized people that take care of the whole process – from the creation and optimization of content all the way to campaign optimization. When it comes to content, for example, it has to be modified in order to be optimized for each platform – from its size to its length, which can be 15 seconds or two minutes, each platform preferring its own length.
Indeed, it’s pretty complicated. This is why these people do it full time, so you can take care of the rest of the things that are important to you. When you work with these people, all budgets are calculated so they will bring you profit. They will do the testing, to see what works best for your target audience (both on the technical side and the keywords used, for example) so they can then deliver the content that they want to see.
So if you want to promote your content and raise awareness for your product in front of potential clients without making too much of an effort and only hope that the ad will be successful, you can get to a specialized agency. They will definitely know what you need – what platforms to use to talk to people that might want your product, what type of content and what budget is needed, and then they will take care of everything – from creating texts that sell to the technical side, optimizing the ads so you can get the most awareness you can get and to sell as much as possible.
