Define innovation?
Well there are several definitions of innovation. But in a highly competitive sales environment where several brands are fighting for the same cake, I found James Osborne’s definition, refreshing and one that made absolute sense.
James is the Director of Innergy, which is a unique blend of consultancy, training, recruitment and other key HR and business support services. It helps businesses to improves performance, increases profitability and enables change.
I attended one of the seminars at the Recruitment Agency Expo 2012, yesterday (15 Feb 2012), where James defined being innovative = “being positively discontent with how everyone else does it.”
I also enjoyed listening to his Purple Cow (author: Seth Godin) analogy and how can you identify “Prospect Generators” to give your new business the much deserved boost and give your business an overall competitive advantage.
A short and very interesting speech indeed after a very long time.
Well done James. There should be a workshop on innovation for sales and marketing departments.
Law firms need short films (videos) on their website and blogs
If you are a senior partner within a law firm or responsible for marketing, you are having to think of different ways of increasing your firms visibility, competitiveness and new business. You might even be wondering how to increase or to manage your firms’s national, continental or global reputation. There are various tricks available at your disposal but a simple and very effective tool that you could use to help you maximize the power of the web is “Online Short Films / Videos”.
We have been triggered to write this post after speaking to several sceptical partners in some senior law firms in London (UK) who either, don’t feel comfortable communicating to their target audience via film or are still ignorant of the benefits of promoting their firm via the audio-visual medium online.
To make it extremely simple for our senior legal sceptics, I have outlined the various possible forms of short film / video formats, they could use on their website or on their blogs to obtain desired results:
1) Corporate Film – “Your Story “
All reputed law firms have a special story of how they came about and what they stand for now. It is a story that could be covered in a 3 to 5 minute short film, which could be streamed on your website’s homepage. Nostalgia is a positive sentiment, which holds the key to linking yourself with your potential target audience and to develop the initial, vital link.
2) CSR Film (Corporate Social Responsibility)
Law firms have serious responsibility when it comes to maintaining social justice and an overall degree of “fairness” in society. But more so, they also make efforts to give back to the society in many different ways which defines their CSR agenda. To help differentiate yourself from your competitors having a short film on your CSR initiatives will help your firm immensely.
3) Profile Short Film / Video – “Your People”
A law firm relies completely on their skilled and experienced work force. Normally you will find the profile of the firm’s people (partners, barristers, senior lawyers, associates and consultants) on a law firm’s website with a photograph and a few lines about the person and their vast experience. Why not make this person more approachable, make his / her more human. Get them out of the prison of texts and images. Let them speak for themselves. Having a 30 sec profile video of all the senior team members who are mentioned on your website will make such a huge difference. Your target audience will find it easy to approach you without any hesitation or inhibitions.
4) Recruitment Film
As the lifeline of your firm is the people you hire, it is imperative that you attract the best of the best. As you would imagine there is a huge competition for the best out there. All your competitors want the best graduates to work for them, as much as you want them to work for you. Short recruitment films give you the opportunity to open yourself up to the potential applicants. Let them know why it is cool to work for your firm? What your firm offers them in terms of future growth and how working for you will be the best career move they ever made?
5) Annual Reports / Reviews Film
The annual report can be in a digital video format, which can summarise all the main points that the staff and other interested readers might struggle to read via the hundreds of page long document.
6) Areas of Expertise Film (both Practices and Industry Sectors)
On your website each of your practice and industry sector pages should have a small film talking about your expertise in that specific area. Remember when a potential client scans your website, he mostly has a concern in a certain industry sector or requires assistance within a particular practice. Now, if they find a short film on their area of interest, instant trust is built between your firm’s brand and them.
7) Customer Case Study Films – “Happy Client Stories”
Not a lot of firms will have willing clients who would be interested in getting themselves filmed for privacy reasons. But those who are willing, will make a great promotional film for your firm. These happy clients are those, who will swear on your firm’s hard work and it’s amazing capabilities. You can also create a secure area on your website which can only be accessed by short term access passwords, which you can give to your potential new client for them to see what your client had to say about your firm (this is for more private clients).
It is forecasted by Cisco in their annual report of 2010, that video content by 2013 will account for 90% of content in comparison to written text. Hence, it is not a matter of choice any more, it is a matter of need. Your firm needs video content.
If you would like to know more about how short films /video can help your law firm and would like to have one produced, please feel free to contact us on info@ekstasy.co or call us on 0044 (0)203 129 5056.
How to put Relationship Marketing into practice?
Relationship marketing is a vague concept, which becomes clear only when put into practice. Purely because building a relationship is the primary goal or should be the primary goal of every business endeavour at every stage of its interaction with its customer. You should clearly not aim to just get an impulsive buy from your client and then forget about them and move on because then that is not business, it is immoral opportunism.
A good moral and ethical business will develop a relationship marketing plan and allocate a budget for it. In my opinion relationship marketing kicks in from the very first contact the company makes with the potential client. and through the journey of trust building and helping the prospect to turn into a client. and then keeping the client a happy client as part of the acquisition stage. and then into the loyalty stage. You build relationships at all stages of your customer journey. Just like a real life relationship with family, partner or friend.
But you got to remember that relationships will not always be positive, they might involve, conflict, struggle, negotiation, unhappy moments, disbelief, discomfort, malice.
It is here that the company needs to behave like a modern father to a child. Where it should be patient and if the child is making unreasonable demands, take the argument on board and then try and resolve the conflict through the eyes of the customer / child. But equally, if you were in the wrong go forward and apologise to your kids and pick them up, hug them and kiss them and maybe buy them their favourite treat. I hope you get the drift.
Interestingly enough, I feel relationship marketing is very similar to improvisation in theatre practice. You Accept what the customer says or reacts, ie action and then you build upon it. Rather than having a monologue of trying to just sell sell sell. You understand what the customer is trying to say and then react accordingly. Establish a Dialogue, which is the basis of all great relationships.
I must confess that the closest any marketing tool has come to creating clear communication or dialogue and trust building, besides face to face meetings is – video marketing. Produce a short 30 sec to 2 min short film on what you are trying to communicate to your customer at the level of relationship you are at with them and then allow them to feed their responses back to you via social media, company website, emails, letters or blogs.
If you would like to know more about how to best utilise video production and video marketing in your endeavour to champion relationship marketing, then please feel free to contact Mike Saraswat or Indu Pillai at Ekstasy Ltd (mike@ekstasy.co or indu@ekstasy.co)
Video Marketing
For a long time now, online content marketing has been considered an important tool for businesses to get their message across to customers. The methods used for content marketing include, articles, blog posts, email marketing and viral marketing. However there is another method than can be extremely powerful and that is Video Marketing. Apart from Google’s online video search engine – You Tube, have become influential means of looking for information about a product or a service. Videos can prove to be means of attracting audiences that don’t necessarily read an article or look through blogs. B2C campaigns via video have proved to be very successful. For e.g. the Nike ‘Write the future campaign’ was viewed 21 million times on Youtube.
But video marketing is not just relevant for FMCG brands, but also in the B2B industry. Success stories, client testimonials, product benefit videos, training videos, clips of speaker opportunities at seminars – all of these are effective elements that can be converted into 2 to 5 minutes video segments. It’s more likely that a potential customer would watch a 2 to 5 minute segment rather than sit through an hour long presentation. Video marketing is also essential especially from an SEO perspective. And now that Google is including video, as a key element to sponsored search; having a video on a B2B website is all the more important.
Once your video is ready, make sure that the video helps in promoting your business:
Make your video search friendly
Video content should be in line with your SEO strategy. If possible use truncated versions of the same video under different titles and descriptions. Include targeted keywords both short tail and long tail.
Activate your video content
Distribution of your video is essential and this can be done in various ways. Youtube of course, would be the first place where you would want to place the video. Apart from Youtube there are other channels like Vimeo, LiveVideo, Digg etc. who offer the means of video sharing. Needless to say the video would need to be incorporated into the website. But one thing to remember is that videos can increase the page download times so it is essential to optimise the video to avoid this from happening. Promote the video through social media, newsletters and through blogs. You can also use the video in seminars, during exhibitions and in a client presentation.
Videos are fantastic marketing tools but they cannot replace a sound marketing strategy. It should enhance the existing content marketing strategy to create higher involvement with customers.
If you would like to know more about how video marketing can help you, contact Ekstasy on info@ekstasy.co
Improve Google ranking of your company using – VIDEO
As an advertising medium, online video is becoming one of the most effective methods of promotion. The amount of time being spent on video online by customers is on the rise. Videos provide two important benefits – Engagement and Involvement. If your video content is engaging then it would be more involving for customers. For e.g. testimonial videos that creatively show the benefit of using a product or service can immediately get a buy-in from the customer. A corporate video that tells a story creates a bigger impact on the minds of customers, than whole lot of text or a still photograph gallery.
In the online media space premium video content has been recognized as a high involvement opportunity than banners. Addition of premium video content has allowed publishers to bring in higher revenues.
But it is relatively unknown that having engaging video content on your site can actually improve your Google page ranking.
Online video that is engaging and involving not only benefits the customers but Google tends to like websites that have videos, especially Youtube videos. This is because a company who has included video in the website would have gone to considerable trouble in creating one for consumer consumption. Google likes that and would reward the business accordingly with a higher ranking.
What Google likes even more is when websites use their video and share it. You tube allows you to create a title for the video, ad a description, use tags or keywords so that the video can be found easily. If the keywords used are similar to the keywords of the business and the words used in the title and description are relevant to the keywords being searched in Google then Google business listing would rank higher in the search results. Needless to say for this to be effective the video content should also be optimised to match the keywords being used for the Google search. A professional online video development company would be able to make sure that the content is relevant.
This is good news especially for local businesses and for businesses with similar offering. This would provide them with another means of differentiation.
Any company that utilizes this opportunity will have the benefit as there are not a lot of businesses who are aware of this.
As a business if you have not considered using video for promotion and for improving Google ranking, it’s time you did. Contact us for more information on info@ekstasy.co
Case Study Videos – getting closer to your customer
With the proliferation of online and social media every business whether small or big has an opportunity to engage with their customers. It is that much easier to let your customers know about you and your products without making every sound bite sound like a sales pitch. But this proliferation means that customers are overloaded with information or are frustrated with wanting to know more about a product or service and having to look through the myriad information available. So a company needs to engage with their customers to develop a long term relationship.
Apart from the traditional methods, there are various ways this engagement can occur, through online marketing, using tools like Facebook, twitter, reddit etc., through viral marketing or through a focused media campaign on targeted websites. Any of the above mentioned tools can be made engaging with use of video. Videos talking about company successes or usability of a product and new emerging products or services can be influential in creating a competitive edge on rivals.
Its always better to ‘show’ a customer rather than ‘tell’ them. Case Study videos do just that and are some of the most important sales and marketing collateral a company can develop for its customers. These case study videos can include customer testimonials which lend immense credibility to potential customers.
Some points to remember when creating a case study video
- A testimonial case study video is impactful. Focus on the satisfied customer and let them tell their experience with you in their own words
- A suitable case study would be about 2 to 4 minutes long
- Make sure that the logo and the tag line appear in the first few clips itself
- Highlight the major milestones in the first minute while you have the customer’s attention
- Production quality is important – shoddy production quality can be detrimental so make sure that you work with a reliable production team
- Ensure that in the script there are keywords embedded to improve SEO opportunities
- And last but not the least ad a call to action
So once the case study video is developed what would be the next steps
- Ad the case study video to the company website
- Use the clip in presentations, on social media and for online campaigns
- Utilise the services of a content activation company like Ekstasy to activate the video
If you would like to know more about developing case study videos and activating them then please contact us on info@ekstasy.co
