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What Are The Best App Marketing Strategies?

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Sourced from Forbes

What are the best app marketing strategies? originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.

Answer by Julia Tokareva, Software Development Consultant at RubyGarage, on Quora:

If you have built a mobile app, you already have faced the tough turf of competition. If you want to stand out, use the following app marketing strategies that can guarantee success to a large extent.

Research target market.

To start marketing your app, you should define your target audience. Don’t try to reach everyone. Choose a particular group of consumers at which your product is aimed and create their profile. Define such important details as demographics, psychographics, habits, lifestyle. The effect will be stronger if you attract target audience instead of all people.

Perform competitor research.

Knowing about your competitors will help you to communicate with your target audience, distinguish your business from competitors, improve your processes, and navigate challenges in your market. Determine their main advantages and try to improve on them.

Create a landing page that sells.

Create a mobile app landing page that keeps readers informed in a creative and unexpected way. Make sure that the key elements of your mobile app landing page are included: app name, features, clear call to action, promo video.

Make your app visible in app store.

This is a process of optimizing mobile apps to rank higher in an app store search results. The higher your app ranks in an app store search results, the more visible it is to potential customers. Main factors that affect your ASO:

  • Title – make it readable, focused and it should have a high recognition value.
  • Description – make sure to point out what problems your app solves and use keywords.
  • Icon – focus on one element that reflects your app’s essence and design it in a unique shape.
  • Screenshots – show an app’s core features and most important functions.

Create viral video content.

Humans are visual creatures, which is why videos are the most popular form of content today. You can create video for YouTube as it’s a powerful tool to spread the word about your product. An effective way to market an app is to create a fun video using famous heroes or playing on sensational memes.

If you want to create a promo video, keep it short and to the point, focus only on your app’s best features and provide a strong call to action. As a final check, mute your video. If it still makes sense, it’s well done.

Start a blog.

Tell your audience about the development process. Blogging can build interest around your product and provides better search visibility. Select target keywords, create quality content, and link to influencers to improve your blog’s search engine rankings.

Reach your audience with social networks.

Social media can help you to reach your potential customers more easily. Social networks provide you an access to important data about users’ interests, hobbies, and so on. This information can help businesses to target their advertisements. For example, Facebook Ads allows you to customize advertising as accurately as possible since ads are targeted solely at your potential users.

Measure your app KPIs.

Regular analysis of your mobile app KPIs will help you gain the best insights into your idea so you’ll know how well your app is doing. Let’s consider the most important KPIs to pay attention to when assessing your app’s success.

julia

Always keep in mind your users and their feelings about your app. When dealing with mobile application marketing, every detail is essential.

If you’re interested in mobile app marketing strategies and how to use them, read this article to know more about this.

This question originally appeared on Quora – the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. You can follow Quora on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. More questions:

Feature Image Credit: Shutterstock

Sourced from Forbes

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10 of the best Google Chrome extensions to make your life easier

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By Richard Priday

Chrome is the biggest web browser. Use these extensions to get it to work for you

Chrome’s web store is full of little digital gadgets to help make your web browsing simpler, more productive, and more enjoyable. Here are our top ten extensions that tick those boxes and are all downloadable for free in a matter of moments.

Social Blade

Compatible with YouTube, Twitch, Instagram and Twitter, Social Blade feeds you knowledge about the videos you watch. A user’s followers, estimated ad earnings and views are shown in an interface next to what you are watching, letting you check how your favourite users and rivals are performing. Get the extension here.

Cite This For Me

Anyone who needs to show the source of their information, be it for an essay or a presentation, will find this button exceedingly useful. It quickly cites the webpage you are looking at in one of four citation styles, which can then be saved for later or pasted into a document. Click here to find out more and install the extension.

LastPass

LastPass means you only have to remember one password to keep all your other login details together in one place. It will also help keep your other accounts secure by generating super secure passwords that it will fill in automatically as needed. There’s space for notes for offline information that you want to be well protected too. Install it here.

Colorzilla

When you simply have to know the precise hue of something online, Colorzilla’s eyedropper can check any pixel and tell you. You can then paste that colour’s data into another programme or adjust the values and save it within the extension for future reference. It’s an invaluable extension for digital design work. Get the extension here.

TinEye

When finding the source of a picture’s proving difficult, try TinEye’s reverse image search. It focuses on the closest possible matches instead of just similarity, making it useful for finding originals, higher resolution versions, or checking for online fakes. The extension itself makes searches available in only a couple of clicks. Install TinEye’s Chrome extension from here.

Unpaywall

For those who want to read academic papers without stumping up for subscription fees. As you look for research, this extension searches for free (and completely legal) versions of the same articles, and pops into view if it finds a match. A potential saver of both time and money. Get it here.

Save to Pocket/Instapaper

Either of these extensions will let you to save web pages and articles for reading on your synced devices later, even without an internet connection. Both have premium versions too, if you want to support the developers and get extra features in return. Get Pocket and Instapaper’s extension here.

The Great Suspender

It’s all too easy to open absurd numbers of tabs in your browser. The Great Suspender helps to manage your computer’s performance by stopping abandoned tabs until you click back on them. There is a lot of room for configuration too, the extension able to keep certain sites open indefinitely, or unload others after a shorter period of time. Install it here.

Backstop

It’s happened to all of us. One bad key press and you’re on the previous webpage and all the info you were just typing into that form has disappeared. This simple extension stops your backspace key from taking you to the previous page, saving you from wasted time and frustration. Get it here.

By Richard Priday

Sourced from WIRED

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How Important is the Founder’s Educational Pedigree?

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Good educational pedigree often results in numerous downstream benefits in the start-up ecosystem

You’re reading Entrepreneur India, an international franchise of Entrepreneur Media.

I often get asked, how important is the founder’s educational pedigree when judging the overall appeal of a start-up’s team? It’s an important question and while individual opinions vary, I’ve seen a general convergence amongst the VC community on this issue.

I believe that education matters more when the founding team is young (let’s say average age 25 or less) for the simple reason that a lot of what they have achieved in life is at academic institutions. Success in academia is by no means a guarantee of future success, but it is a good proxy of the ability of the team to produce great products, especially in knowledge-driven industries like high tech. I believe academic success is also a good proxy of the ability to put in long, disciplined hours towards achieving ambitious goals.

An interesting spin on this revolves around the advent of acqui-hiring — a trend which is beginning to shape (albeit a very smart part) of M&A in India. The philosophy is simple – all other things equal – a young team of engineers from reputable institutions is more likely to get acqui-hired than a similar team from less prominent institutions. A good example of where academic success actually translates into success in the business world. Again, with the caveat, that this is a very small part of M&A activity – so just don’t start a company if you are from IIT/MIT/Stanford/CMU in hopes of a payout from the start-up world. Nonetheless, the theory stands – acqu-hiring happens when the knowledge and know-how is extremely valuable to the acquirer — and this raw technical horsepower is better honed at reputable technological institutions.

As the median age of the starting team gets higher, say closer to the 30’s then academic qualifications get eclipsed, to a great extent, by success in the business world and other ‘real-world’ experiences. So, if one is comparing two founders – one from IIT (just an example of a good University) and the other from University B, and the latter has had a better career path, post-graduation, worked  in an entrepreneurially minded company, then the scales are balanced or even tilted slightly in favor of the person from University B.

Other ‘Perks’ of Good Educational Pedigree

Good educational pedigree often results in numerous downstream benefits in the start-up ecosystem. Most of these revolve around the kinds of people that one can attract to the ecosystem – investors, employees, interns, business development partners, and more.

The central theme, obviously, being the fact that the strong alumni relationships that exist at these institutions.  Both in terms of sheer size but also (and this is something I notice), is a sense of school pride that arises from graduating from august colleges.  Founders from these colleges, especially the more outgoing ones, are often able to build a good aura around the companies they build – and this tremendously helps in attracting the right team, investors, partners, media attention, and more. This acts as a source of comfort for early-stage investors like us – to know that the founding team has the wherewithal and the resourcefulness to bring together the right set of actors at appropriate phases in the start-up’s evolutions.  An ability that most will agree is the very difference between success and failure in the early stage industry.

So, Why Not Invest Just in Ivy League Graduates?

Lest you be numbed by what seems to be a continuous endorsement of top-rated academic institutions, I want to remind you – founding team pedigree is just one aspect of Team appeal – and Team is just one aspect of the overall appeal of a start-up. Many staggeringly successful companies have been founded and built by entrepreneurs that have actually dropped out of college. In many other cases, entrepreneurs from less-than-stellar colleges have outperformed peers by building better products, superior marketing strategies,  sheer execution finesse and resourcefulness in attracting and charming stakeholders in the ecosystem.

There is also a dark side in investing in ‘Ivy leaguers’ – a sense of entitlement that comes from the academic pedigree – and something which translates directly into demands for higher valuations and other start-up-friendly terms.  I’ve seen situations where investors, mesmerized by educational pedigree, sign off on significantly unfavorable terms than what the situation normally mandates. Clearly a case of misplaced enthusiasm and irrational understanding of a dynamic that should be used to differentiate between teams in marginal situations (all other things being equal). And not, to be the sole deciding factor in deciding which start-up to invest in.

What does all this mean for aspiring founders? If you’ve made it to a reputed institution, make the best of it! Build strong networks within the student community – these will be of tremendous value to you throughout your entrepreneurial journey. And if you did not make it to a top-rated school , there are plentiful opportunities to realize your entrepreneurial goals – go ahead and hone your skills and serendipitous moments will come by!

Feature Image Credit: Shutterstock 

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Partner, Anthill Ventures

Sourced from Entrepreneur

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Same insight, different output: how Pepsi is localising content ideas

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By Charlotte McEleny

Brands are now creating as much content as any publisher but without having consumers interests in mind, it can be a fruitless investment.

For multinational brands, where the pressure to deliver relevance across multiple markets is high, this challenge (and opportunity) is amplified. Speaking at Ad:Tech in New Delhi this week, Pepsico global head of media and content innovation CoE, Atin Kulkarni, said his brands regularly use a strategy that involves focusing on a global insight that is delivered using local, relevant stories.

Kulkarni gave the example of its recent, well known ‘Generations’ campaign for Superbowl which used the insight that Pepsi has been a drink that has been with its customers across generations. The US version of this insight saw the brand refresh old campaigns that tied into key popular culture moments, reminding people of this link.

This insight was then taken to another, vastly different but important Pepsi market, Saudi Arabia. The theme around ‘generations’ was revisited, but instead of tying into pop culture, Pepsi decided that nodding to the change that the Saudi population is going through would connect with its target audience instead.

The recently released campaign follows Saudi men as they get ready for success at the start of a day, it shifts through different men from different generations. In a nod to the change in the country it then also shifts to include women within the story too. Once again the message ties to the insight that Pepsi is along for the ride, across generations.

“When we took it to Saudi Arabia, we used the same insight – that we have been part of the generations. The country is going through somewhat of a change, geopolitical, oil prices and a new Prince with a new vision. We have been part of their lives and been part of society, including when this new generation comes along and the new vision comes along. It is the same idea but a very different context in the life of a nation that is going through a lot of change,” explained Kulkarni.

Kulkarni shared that the film went viral, despite a shift in the strategy around media spend for the content. He said the spend on TV for the ad was significantly dialled down and, with reference to its focus on a ‘new generation’ and change in the country, it instead moved media spend to new channels and digital placements, including the use of influencers.

“Practically speaking, this also impacted how we managed media and delivered the content. We used both TV and digital but in this case the team took a risk in how it planned TV. Rather than putting almost everything on TV, they dialled it down, used all the other modern ways, such as influencers and interesting platforms because it was the best way to leverage this insight,” he added.

According to Kulkarni, the campaign delivered over 4 billion impressions, which he said was a significant level of reach for a campaign in the region. This success, he reasons, was due to the relevance of the ad. “It resonated with what the people were thinking and what they were going through,” he said.

Managing content-led campaigns across multiple markets and cultures is a significant challenge for brands currently and the response varies across different brands and briefs. A campaign launched this week by rival Coca-Cola approached the challenge differently, by taking a neutral geographic approach to working with partners and encouraging diversity in casting.

 

By Charlotte McEleny

Sourced from THEDRUM

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24 Email Marketing Stats Every Business Owner Should Know (Infographic)

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By Kimberly de Silva.

Email marketing is the cornerstone of many marketing programs.

Email marketing is the cornerstone of many marketing programs. It can make engaging with and retaining customers much easier with high-powered tools like automation and personalization. And using mobile-friendly email templates ensures that no matter what device your customer uses to view them, your emails will always look great.

Campaign Monitor has created an infographic, “24 Email Marketing Stats You Need to Know” to help you understand just what value email marketing brings to a small business. For example, for every $1 spent, email marketing brings in $44; for one of the highest ROIs of any marketing tactic.

Personalized messages bring results

A high ROI is fantastic, of course, but with a powerful marketing tool like this, there are even better reasons for email marketing. By using an email service provider, you can create emails that are personalized for each customer, helping them to connect with your business.

The more your customers engage with your business and emails, the more likely they are to purchase from you. Emails with personalized subject lines are 26 percent more likely to be opened. And personalization doesn’t stop at the subject line.

You can add images and content that are specific to each reader to keep them interested in what your business offers. The more you can send emails that your customers want to see, with information that they’re looking for, the more likely they’ll stay your customer. Using data you already have about them can help you to personalize emails a little bit more. Keeping your data updated, by using signup forms or surveys, can help you collect the information you need to do this.

Automation saves time and engages customers

Automation, creating a series of emails once and sending them out automatically when certain criteria are met, can help keep customers coming back for more. Sending out welcome emails, reminder emails, VIP emails or even birthday emails can help to hold your customer’s attention, and lead to sales.

As a matter of fact, automated emails can generate 320 percent more revenue than non-automated ones. Using automation and personalization together can make marketers’ lives a little easier since they need to only create an email once to have each person get the version they need, and sent when they need it.

Since email open rates increased to 68 percent on mobile devices in 2016, it’s important to make sure your email can be read on any device. Just about everyone has a mobile phone and reads their emails on it these days. The easiest way to do this is to use a template that’s already set up to work on mobile devices. This way no special coding is needed and your customers will have an easy-to-read and useful email. Plus, you’ll still be able to use personalization and automation, the end device won’t change how they work.

Email marketing stats worth knowing

From personalization and automation to a high ROI, email marketing can make staying in touch with customers a breeze. And, it will help to not only convert leads to customers but help retain the customers you already have. For more useful and fun email marketing stats and tips, check out the infographic below.

This story originally appeared on Bizness Apps

Feature Image Credit: juststock | Getty Images 

By Kimberly de Silva.

Sourced from Entrepreneur

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Twitter is working on a camera-first feature that could threaten Snap

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  • Twitter is working on a camera-first feature to rival a Snap service that has been popular with advertisers.
  • The company has been aggressively courting advertisers after posting its first-ever quarterly profit.
Jack Dorsey attends the ‘#SheInspiresMe: Twitter celebrates female voices & visionaries’ event in Cannes, France.

Twitter is working on camera-first feature that could change the emphasis on the platform from text to video and images, giving advertisers a competitor to one of Snap’s most popular advertising opportunities, according to three senior agency executives who have either seen a demonstration of the product or are familiar with it.

The new function would combine location-based photos and videos with Twitter Moments around notable events. Companies could sponsor events or place ads in between tweeted real-time photos and videos.

The feature would resemble how Snap collects location-based snaps around certain topics and displays them together as a highlighted post on its Discover tab — a feature that has proven popular with advertisers. For example, on Wednesday Snap featured a Discover story on the national school walkouts in protest of school shootings, with snaps from The Washington Post interspersed throughout. Snap has also featured content posted from select MLB games and awards shows.

It’s unclear when the feature could launch, and it could still be refined significantly or scrapped entirely, but ad executives with knowledge of it believed that it was early in the development process.

A spokesperson for Twitter declined to comment.

Twitter has been aggressively going after new advertising business after posting its first profitable quarter, according to multiple advertising agencies. Last year, it was the sixth largest company in terms of digital advertising revenue, according to eMarketer, and video is generally much more lucrative to advertise against than text.

Since everyone is used to posting on Twitter in real time, a camera-first Twitter Moments idea would be a natural fit for Twitter’s users, said one agency executive.

And there would be demand for the product from advertisers, another agency executive said, since Twitter is often the go-to place for customers who are engaged and passionate around cultural moments. The executives CNBC spoke to called the potential new feature a necessary and natural progression to reach younger consumers sharing events with their friends.

One source — who were not briefed on the new feature — said if it was done right Twitter had the scale and potential to take ad dollars away from Snap. Another said that with Facebook going the direction of ultra-personalized content, Twitter could open up an avenue to reach a bigger audience.

“Despite its struggles, the recent revenue surge suggest Twitter seems poised for a rebound,” said Parker Ray, Chief Digital Strategist for MWWPR.

“Twitter has been hyper-focused on being a home for live video with partnerships to stream NFL games and the launch of a live-streaming news channel with Bloomberg. In addition, Facebook’s tweaking of its news feed, prioritizing personal posts from family and friends over videos and posts from businesses and news media, could make Twitter very appealing to brands. We’re definitely seeing a healthy uptick when it comes to including Twitter in marketing budgets.”

Feature Image Credit: Francois Durand | Getty Images

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12 Simple Tricks For Anyone Who Wants To Feel More Creative

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By Emily Shwake

Stop telling yourself you’re not creative, and start telling yourself you’re the next Picasso.

1.Try working from a café, because a little noise will actually do your imagination good.

The writer in a café is a classic stereotype, but for good reason. Several studies have shown that a moderate level of noise (70–80 decibels, to be specific) is actually really helpful for getting in the creative zone.If you can't get to a café, try listening to white noise or music without lyrics.
buzzfeed.com

The writer in a café is a classic stereotype, but for good reason. Several studies have shown that a moderate level of noise (70–80 decibels, to be specific) is actually really helpful for getting in the creative zone.

If you can’t get to a café, try listening to white noise or music without lyrics.

2. Ignore the little voice that keeps telling you you’re not a true creative, and fake it ’til you make it.

instagram.com

If you feel like you’re too left-brained or logical to be creative, you’re selling yourself short and shooting yourself in the foot. The stereotype you embrace is the one you embody: the educational psychologists that tested out this idea call it the creative stereotype effect. So, if you walk around acting like you’re the next Picasso or Sylvia Plath, you may find that you had more ideas than you originally thought. On the other hand, if you try to write a short story thinking like the Type A mathlete you always thought you were, you’re probably going to have a tough time.

3. Give your mind permission to wander, because you’ll burn out really quickly if you push yourself to focus for hours at a time.

When you're trying really really hard to make yourself focus (like when you plan an eight-hour block of time to spend at the library), you're going to burn yourself out really quickly. It's important to take active periods of unfocus, and deliberately disconnect from the task at hand. Try doing something you find relaxing like taking a walk, doing a puzzle, or doodling. Doing so will allow your mind to wander and might actually spark that creativity that you've been pushing so hard for.
IFC / Via giphy.com

When you’re trying really really hard to make yourself focus (like when you plan an eight-hour block of time to spend at the library), you’re going to burn yourself out really quickly. It’s important to take active periods of unfocus, and deliberately disconnect from the task at hand. Try doing something you find relaxing like taking a walk, doing a puzzle, or doodling. Doing so will allow your mind to wander and might actually spark that creativity that you’ve been pushing so hard for.

4. When creating, dig deeper into your own experiences so you aren’t leaning on cliché, overused tropes.

Let's say you're trying to write a comedy set about a plane trip. You could talk about how ridiculous the security line in the airport is or you could talk about how tiny the seats are, but you won't be telling the audience something they've already heard. Look past that, and think about your specific experience the last time you flew. Maybe you had a really strange conversation you had with your seat mate. Maybe you felt so freakin' awkward trying to get in line for the bathroom because you kept on getting in the way of the flight attendants. (Hey, I'm not a comedian, it's your job to make it funny.) Those are the things that everyone knows are true without realizing it. It's your job to make them pay attention.
Comedy Central / Via giphy.com

Let’s say you’re trying to write a comedy set about a plane trip. You could talk about how ridiculous the security line in the airport is or you could talk about how tiny the seats are, but you won’t be telling the audience something they’ve already heard. Look past that, and think about your specific experience the last time you flew. Maybe you had a really strange conversation you had with your seat mate. Maybe you felt so freakin’ awkward trying to get in line for the bathroom because you kept on getting in the way of the flight attendants. (Hey, I’m not a comedian, it’s your job to make it funny.) Those are the things that everyone knows are true without realizing it. It’s your job to make them pay attention.

5. Write all of your ideas down…and then get them out of your sight so they aren’t distracting you.

Sometimes the hardest part isn't coming up with ideas, it's getting yourself to focus on them. Keep a list somewhere — on a sticky note, a page in your journal, the draft of an email — of all of the ideas that you're so excited about. In a couple of days or weeks, when you've "run out" of ideas, consult it. Find the one that actually still makes sense and has some potential, and get rid of the others. Rest assured: if the ideas are really good, they'll come back to you.
NBC / Via giphy.com

Sometimes the hardest part isn’t coming up with ideas, it’s getting yourself to focus on them. Keep a list somewhere — on a sticky note, a page in your journal, the draft of an email — of all of the ideas that you’re so excited about. In a couple of days or weeks, when you’ve “run out” of ideas, consult it. Find the one that actually still makes sense and has some potential, and get rid of the others. Rest assured: if the ideas are really good, they’ll come back to you.

6. Write a few pages every morning to clear out the cobwebs, and establish a habit of actually getting some writing done.

Morning pages is an old-school trick for clearing out the cobwebs that writers still swear by. It's super simple: just write three pages every morning. Period. That may seem daunting, but you can write literally anything. It doesn't matter. You could write a hundred lines of "I will write my morning pages every day" and it will still count. Eventually, something good will come out. You're creating a routine, an expectation for yourself that you will write every morning when your brain is fresh and the day has just begun.
Rachel Miller

Morning pages is an old-school trick for clearing out the cobwebs that writers still swear by. It’s super simple: just write three pages every morning. Period. That may seem daunting, but you can write literally anything. It doesn’t matter. You could write a hundred lines of “I will write my morning pages every day” and it will still count. Eventually, something good will come out. You’re creating a routine, an expectation for yourself that you will write every morning when your brain is fresh and the day has just begun.

7. Or do it at the end of the day when you’re totally exhausted.

Weirdly enough, we're more creative when we're tired. Your brain isn't as good at filtering out distractions, so you're more likely to have a crazy idea. Work some time into your evening routine (maybe an hour or so) to unpack all of those ideas onto a page. Not a screen — actual paper, please. Putting all of your thoughts down instead of letting them race through your head may actually help you get more sleep.
Warner Bros. / Via giphy.com

Weirdly enough, we’re more creative when we’re tired. Your brain isn’t as good at filtering out distractions, so you’re more likely to have a crazy idea. Work some time into your evening routine (maybe an hour or so) to unpack all of those ideas onto a page. Not a screen — actual paper, please. Putting all of your thoughts down instead of letting them race through your head may actually help you get more sleep.

8. Let yourself get totally bored because that’s when your mind starts to wander into something awesome.

Those five minutes it takes you to walk to the bathroom, ten minutes it takes to grab a cup of coffee, or twenty minutes to commute to work are all healthy boredom breaks for your brain. Instead of scrolling through your Twitter feed or checking your email, do absolutely nothing else. Those little breaks will give you the space to think and imagine, and might even free up a bit more time for your creative endeavors.Listen to Manoush Zomorodi's podcast "Note to Self" or read her book Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive and Creative Self for more ideas like this. Get the book from Amazon for $18.35, from Barnes & Noble for $19.28, or find it at your local bookseller on IndieBound.
ABC / Via giphy.com

Those five minutes it takes you to walk to the bathroom, ten minutes it takes to grab a cup of coffee, or twenty minutes to commute to work are all healthy boredom breaks for your brain. Instead of scrolling through your Twitter feed or checking your email, do absolutely nothing else. Those little breaks will give you the space to think and imagine, and might even free up a bit more time for your creative endeavors.

Listen to Manoush Zomorodi’s podcast “Note to Self” or read her book Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive and Creative Self for more ideas like this. Get the book from Amazon for $18.35, from Barnes & Noble for $19.28, or find it at your local bookseller on IndieBound.

9. Keep your “darlings” in a separate file so you don’t actually have to kill them.

If you've ever created art, written a line, or created a character that you were sure was peak genius, you have darlings. And when someone doesn't understand them, it seems like the most ridiculous, outrageous thing in the world. Throwing out, killing off, or scratching out your darlings is painful. But if they're getting in your way, hide them away in a place you don't see but can dig up later. It'll be less painful to get rid of them later when you've replaced them.
Warner Bros. / Via giphy.com

If you’ve ever created art, written a line, or created a character that you were sure was peak genius, you have darlings. And when someone doesn’t understand them, it seems like the most ridiculous, outrageous thing in the world. Throwing out, killing off, or scratching out your darlings is painful. But if they’re getting in your way, hide them away in a place you don’t see but can dig up later. It’ll be less painful to get rid of them later when you’ve replaced them.

10. Join a team of other creators so you have people to rely on when the going gets tough.

Creating something can be a lonely business...but it doesn't have to be! Create a network or start a monthly meeting with a few people trying to pursue on creative endeavors. You'll hold each other accountable and have people to bounce your ideas off of. If none of your pals are interested, join groups that already exist. Meetup can help you find communities of people in your local area that are doing the same things — writing, drawing, photography, etc. — as you!
NBC / Via giphy.com

Creating something can be a lonely business…but it doesn’t have to be! Create a network or start a monthly meeting with a few people trying to pursue on creative endeavors. You’ll hold each other accountable and have people to bounce your ideas off of.

If none of your pals are interested, join groups that already exist. Meetup can help you find communities of people in your local area that are doing the same things — writing, drawing, photography, etc. — as you!

11. Stop judging yourself and take that first step because imperfect action is better than no action at all.

The hardest part of doing something is doing it. Don't worry about whether it sounds good, looks good, or even makes sense. Start creating and don't look back. You can edit, delete, burn (idk, it's your process) it later.
Killer Films / Via rebloggy.com

The hardest part of doing something is doing it. Don’t worry about whether it sounds good, looks good, or even makes sense. Start creating and don’t look back. You can edit, delete, burn (idk, it’s your process) it later.

12. And remember that you have the skills to get it done, and that the hard work will be worth it in the end.

instagram.com

If you’ve never doubted your creativity or potential, then hats off to you. But for most, it’s one of the most paralyzing parts of the process. It’s so easy to tell yourself the reasons that you can’t do it, that it’s hard to remember the reasons why you can. You’re a creator. Keep telling yourself that. Or get someone else to do it. The Creative Pep Talk podcast will support you through those tough times, and give you the tools to get through it.

Now go create your pants off!

 

By Emily Shwake

Sourced from BuzzFeed

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6 Ways You Can Use YouTube to Reach Your Intended Audience

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By Jason R. Rich

The following excerpt is from Jason Rich’s book Ultimate Guide to YouTube for Business. Buy it now from Amazon | Barnes & Noble | iBooks | IndieBound

Everyone who uses YouTube to promote themselves or their company has their own goals. The following is information about six popular ways YouTube can be used as part of your overall online strategy to achieve your company’s goals.

1. Promote Yourself as an Online Personality and Entertain Your Audience

One strategy small businesses use effectively to personalize their brand and build a rapport with the audience is to use YouTube videos to introduce their company’s leaders and position these people as spokespeople who appear in videos. Some company spokespeople have even achieved celebrity status from starring in YouTube videos to promote themselves, their products, and/or their companies.

If you’re a small-business owner with a big personality, consider starring in your own YouTube videos to help build your company’s brand, tell its story, and promote its message. Featuring the actual leader of your company can help personalize your business and build its credibility. You could also demonstrate products, speak authoritatively, and boost your company’s brand recognition and reputation.

2. Share Your Knowledge, Commentary, or How-to Information

One reason YouTube has become so popular is that in addition to watching countless hours of entertaining videos, people can quickly find informative and easy-to-understand how-to videos about any topic imaginable. As a business owner, chances are you have expertise that other people could easily benefit from.

YouTube offers an informal yet powerful way to communicate directly with your customers, in your own words, in a forum that gives you absolute control over the content. Using a bit of creativity, chances are you’ll come up with a handful of ideas about how your business could benefit from communicating directly with its customers (or potential customers) using YouTube. For example, you could create a product demonstration or product comparison video. Other options might be to showcase customer testimonials in a video or to create how-to videos that explain how to assemble, operate, or use your products/services.

One popular trend on YouTube is for companies or individuals to produce “unboxing” videos. Basically, someone takes a new (still packaged) product, then films themselves opening and using the product for the first time, as they share their initial impressions. These videos are watched by people interested in the product, but who haven’t yet purchased it.

In addition, many companies have dramatically cut costs associated with offering telephone technical support by supplementing printed product manuals and product assembly instructions (which people hate to read and find difficult to understand) with informative how-to videos that are highly engaging.

3. Introduce a New Product or Service and Direct People to Your Online Store

Showcasing products on YouTube is a low-cost yet highly effective way to demonstrate products to your customers, showcase features, and explain how to best use a product especially if you’re operating an online-based business or there’s an online component to your traditional retail business. In addition to showcasing a product’s features or functions, you can use YouTube videos to answer commonly asked questions.

Keep in mind, people who use YouTube don’t want to watch blatant commercials for your products or services. Consumers are already bombarded with advertising in their everyday lives. While your videos can certainly promote a product or service, and build awareness or demand for it, take a soft-sell approach that’s entertaining as well as informative.

4. Teach People How to Use a Product or Service

Many businesses have discovered that producing YouTube videos as an instructional tool can help improve customer loyalty, reduce returns, and allow a business to enhance its customer service efforts without putting a strain on resources.

How-to videos for a product offer a different approach than a product demo, yet both approaches can benefit businesses looking to promote and sell products. While a how-to video is designed to teach someone how to do something, a product demo simply showcases a product’s features or functions, and gives the viewer a chance to see a product in action. Either type of video can be used as part of a business-to-consumer or business-to-business sales and marketing strategy.

Instructional videos can help to reduce incoming customer service (and tech support) calls. You can produce instructional videos to teach people how to assemble and/or use a product, for example, plus help customers easily discover the true potential of a product, while eliminating their potential frustration. Your videos can also be used to highlight lesser-known features of or uses for a product that your customers might not otherwise consider.

5. Share Video Footage of Business Presentations You’ve Given

If you’ve presented a lecture, workshop, or some type of presentation, consider uploading the edited video footage of it to YouTube for your customers, clients, and the public to see. This will help establish you as an expert or authority, allow you to convey valuable information to potential customers and clients, plus help you build awareness of you and your company.

This information can be supplemented with an animated and narrated digital slide (PowerPoint) presentation that you post on your YouTube channel, and/or include a recorded one-on-one interview with you talking about something in which your (potential) customers or clients would be interested.

6. Provide Background Information about Your Company and Tell Its Story

Every company has a story to tell, as do the founders or current leaders of that business. By telling your story, chances are, you’ll be able to enhance your customer loyalty and brand awareness, while also educating the public about what your company does and its core philosophies.

Any type of behind-the-scenes videos can also be useful. For example, you can produce and publish a video that focuses on how your product(s) are made, provide a tour of your company, and introduce some of the people who work at your company within the video(s). If you’ve invented a product, you can explain where the inspiration for the product came from and why you’re personally passionate about the product.

Feature Image credit: wundervisuals | Getty Images 

By Jason R. Rich

Jason R. Rich, based in Foxboro, Mass., is author of more than 55 books on topics including ecommerce, online marketing, digital photography and interactive entertainment, as well as the Apple iPhone and iPad.

Sourced from Entrepreneur

 

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Relying on Social Marketing? Give Outdoor Advertising Another Look

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Opinion: It’s in the real world, so it’s not prone to click fraud

When I was expansion manager for grocery delivery service Instacart circa 2014, I ran into a problem: declining effectiveness of our social media and online ads.

The market was simply too saturated, with delivery services like Instacart, plus a fast-growing cadre of meal-kit delivery services. It was hard to cut through all the noise.

We also suspected, but couldn’t prove, that a high percentage of our clicks were junk, powered by bots. And this was well before the 2016 election with Russians on Facebook.

So, our team decided to do something really different: We turned to outdoor ads—specifically, billboards and transportation ads, such as bus stop and subway posters. At the time, the ability to definitively measure their impact was sparse, but we did see a boost in subscriptions and had no other campaigns running at the time.

Since that experiment, I’ve left Instacart and started my own company focused on making outdoor advertising easier to book and measurable. And as someone who once relied almost entirely on social media ads, I can tell you that outdoor is now just as quantifiable if you use the right tools and know what you’re doing.

Here are the ways in which outdoor has advantages over social media:

  • It’s in the real world, so it’s not prone to click fraud—at least until someone invents bots that drive past billboards or take the bus and subway.
  • It’s super-high-frequency, with significant exposure and traffic. No other medium reaches consumers with the frequency of outdoor advertising. We all know that one billboard or subway ad that greeted you on your commute for months.
  • It reaches more than 90 percent of the population. Not everyone is online—and in particular online at the social media sites you’ve selected for your campaign—but within a community, chances are that almost everyone will see a local billboard or other outdoor campaign in the course of their daily activity.
  • It’s easily shareable on social media, because it’s so visual.
  • Geographic targeting is unmatched: You can select media right down to the longitude and latitude of the community you want.
  • It drives an outsized share of online searches. Out-of-home advertising is the most effective offline medium in driving online activity, according to Nielsen.

How do you make outdoor measurable? There are a variety of ways. Options include:

  • Campaign integration with Google Analytics to measure lift in site traffic by area. This technique has been proven to increase site traffic by more than 40 percent versus controls.
  • Integration with Google AdWords to measure cost per click and click-through rates by area, in order to quantify performance efficiencies in online advertising. As outdoor advertising drives up a company’s awareness, its online ads perform more efficiently.
  • Social media image recognition, an algorithm to scrape social media images to quantify the number of additional impressions using campaign images or tags. We at AdQuick did this for a campaign for Drake’s OVO fashion brand and found $6,000 worth of Instagram shares in one week from one New York billboard.
  • Shortcodes, which are beneficial for transit and pedestrian-focused campaigns. They give any campaign a call to action and make it more engaging, and results are easily measured simply by tracking shortcode usage.
  • Geo-fenced mobile ads to measure engagement rate by area. This technique involves creating and serving ads on smartphones that mirror the message on outdoor advertising. This gives advertisers another way to measure engagement and provides consumers with a way to learn more about a brand’s offering and quantify the boost OOH drives in other channels. This technique can lead to engagement rates that are 30 percent to 50 percent higher in areas with outdoor ads versus controls.
  • Geographic surveys (based on ZIP code), tracking brand awareness and channel attribution in the areas surrounding the outdoor advertising locations.
  • Movement tracking, to quantify the increase in foot traffic an outdoor ad drives to a brick-and-mortar location.

If you are a digital marketer who hasn’t considered offline ads in recent memory, you need to give outdoor another look. Enough has changed in the past two years to make it a valid alternative to the crowded social media ad landscape.

Feature Image: We all know that one billboard or subway ad that greeted you on your commute for months. Lya_Cattel/iStock

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Matt O’Connor is founder and CEO of AdQuick, a platform that enables brands to buy outdoor advertising.

Sourced from ADWEEK

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