by TODD HARTLEY, on Jan 3, 2018 7:20:00 AM
The digital marketing landscape is changing faster than businesses can keep up.
Over 50% of Fortune 500 companies have disappeared within the past 20 years, Chief Marketing Officers have the highest turnover on LinkedIn, and sales teams are losing the battle for prospects attention.
Several megatrends are converging and forcing business leaders to evolve, or face extinction. To help you get caught up on these trends, we're breaking each of them down so you can adapt and survive.
The Netflix Economy: How to Create Bingeworthy Buying Experiences
Before Netflix there was Blockbuster. Remember them?
They went out of business because they didn’t adjust to the online world.
Netflix, on the other hand, adapted when the movie rental industry began transitioning to online services and streaming, cementing themselves as the dominant player in their field.
They started the on-demand revolution by creating a scalable convenience service where they cut out infrastructure to compete.
The Netflix Economy is how they grew from that point on, and it defines the state of the world that businesses live in today.
View the original article here: The Netflix Economy: How To Create Binge Worthy Buying Experiences
Using Relevance in Your Binge Worthy Video Content
You’re ready to wind down for the night.
You grab a snack and a drink, plop down on the couch, and fire up Netflix.
Immediately, you’re greeted with a selection of recommended tv shows and movies based on what you’ve watched in the past.
Now you can binge-watch MORE of what you already like, within seconds.
Convenient, right?
This is a perfect example of what a hyper-relevant, personalized experience feels like, and it's a major trend in marketing.
On-demand, personalized experiences is now a cost of doing business. People expect content, ads, and sales experiences to be relevant to them. Unfortunately, most brands are still speaking to everybody, and that’s why Fortune 500 companies are crashing hard.
Traditional marketing is based on brand marketing principles, but now it's more important than ever for brand marketers to learn about direct response and sales. So how do you create effective, bingeable experiences? It starts with getting super clear on your sales and marketing message.
View the original article here: Using Relevance in Your Binge Worthy Video Content
How Branding and Direct Response are Converging
Traditionally, there used to be two camps: branding and direct response. The goal of branding teams was to generate awareness for their product or service, and the goal of direct response teams was to get people to take a desired measurable action. But now, the line between those two camps are blurring.
We are seeing traditional brands, like Budweiser, becoming more strategic with their advertising — combining branding and direct response marketing with storytelling principles to position themselves against their core competitors. We're also seeing traditional digital brands, like Dollar Shave Club, advertising on television.
So how can you combine branding with direct response to get the best results? Let's break this down into 3 parts: beginning, middle, and end.
The beginning of the journey is where you define your market segments and creating a message for each one. This is the branding part — aligning with what your audience cares about today and then diagnose the underlying problem.
The middle of the journey is where your customers are evaluating competition solutions. This is where direct response often reigns supreme. This content should position your brand against your competitors and explain what makes you unique or better.
The end of the journey, or the decision stage, is where you leverage your sales assets to close the deal. This could be a sales demo, pre-frame video, or strategic follow-up messages.
View the original article here: How Branding and Direct Response are Converging
The Long-Form Video Trend & Why It's the Secret to Binge Worthy Buying Experiences
Conventional wisdom says that shorter videos are better because more people will watch a short video than a long video.
“It’s better if people watch 100% of our 30-second video than if they only watch 50% of our 10-minute video, right!?”
…Unfortunately, conventional wisdom is wrong
Businesses have been misled to believe that video completion is the “North Star” metric they should be optimizing for, but message delivery is the REAL metric that matters.
The objective is to get people who are going to buy from you to consume your message as quickly and easily as possible.
If you have a longer, more complex sales cycle than you’re going to need a longer, more complex content experience. So the big takeaway is that longer videos achieve that objective better than shorter videos.
View the original article here: The Long-Form Video Trend & Why It's the Secret to Binge Worthy Buying Experiences
The Future of Social Video: How To Stand Out In The Feed
Companies that are using social to increase website traffic are unknowingly shooting themselves in the foot.
Superplatforms like Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn will punish you for posting third-party content — like linking off to your blog, capture page, or any external website — because it violates their goal of keeping people on-site (so they can serve ads and make money).
In other words, they don’t want non-native content published on their platform. So don’t post YouTube links on Facebook, and don’t drive people off YouTube within the first few minutes of your video.
Anytime you are successful at getting people to click away from the platform, you’re hurting that content’s chance of success and you’ll be demoted in the algorithms.
So what’s the solution? Create native content.
Native content is content that’s designed for the specific social media platform it lives on. Not only is it a better experience for your audience, but you’ll also be rewarded by the algorithms with higher rankings and more exposure.
View the original article here: The Future of Social Video: How To Stand Out In The Feed
The Prosumer Evolution: Why It's Taking The World By Storm
We are living in an age where you no longer have to be a professional to create professional quality video content.
No, this isn’t an exaggeration. Before the prosumer shift, there were only two sides of the coin: amateur or pro.
But now, the divide between hobbyist and professional is continuing to shrink. Everyone has access to affordable, high-quality equipment to create better video content.
So why should this matter to you?
For one, there’s no excuse for poor video content anymore — businesses have higher expectations than before.
Secondly, prosumer equipment makes it easier to tell emotionally-driven, cinematic stories that capture attention and pull prospects through your sales and marketing message. That means more clients and more revenue for your business.
View the original article here: The Prosumer Evolution: Why It's Taking The World By Storm
Conclusion
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