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Top 10 tricks Local fmcg Influencers use to build brand sales You Need To Know

Fmcg marketing budget,

advertising spend on influencer marketing in india

Talking about responsive display ads, the internet’s gift to anyone who wants to automate advertising without surrendering complete creative control.

By partnering with a local brand influencer, your business can increase visibility and leverage the name recognition of a public figure in exciting ways! Catapult your brand awareness in a specific market, and harness influencer sway over new and captivated audiences! 

What Is A Local Brand Influencer?

A local brand influencer is defined as an individual who holds name recognition, a level of celebrity or sway over a region or community.

From radio hosts to television personalities to sports figures, these personalities traditionally have built-in audiences that follow or consume their content.

Social media influencers have become leading targets for brands and businesses looking to grow their reach within specific audiences or demographics.

With Generation Z branded as the next hot target of content marketing campaigns, there are audiences everywhere ready to engage with quality marketing campaigns.

When searching for a local brand influencer to represent your business, here are some key considerations:

Shop local

A region-specific influencer is a valuable brand ambassador for your business.

Their audience, represented through attendees at sporting events or via the number of followers on their account, clearly resonates with them and follows their careers or messaging.

Think Micro Influencer

Engaging influencers with global appeal or a huge following actually dilutes your brand message.

The best content marketing is targeted to a specific clientele or audience. If you’re casting too wide a net, the specificity that allows good content to reach a target audience is lost.

The message you’re trying to send often has to be widened in scope accordingly, and the subsequent ability to appeal to your specific, identified customer is harder to lock down. Look to the follower count of a targeted micro influencer for insight into their viability in your target market.

Leverage Engagement

If you’re considering reaching out to a huge celebrity or global personality, consider this: The odds of a huge (or macro) influencer spending the time and energy necessary to successfully promote your brand or small business are small… assuming they even respond to your initial pitch!

Rest assured, if you’re thinking of reaching out to an influencer with an amazing opportunity to promote your brand, others have as well. The bigger the influencer, the more brands they’re likely to champion. Don’t let your influencer campaign get lost in the shuffle!

A tip when it comes to engaging a local brand influencer with your proposed endorsement opportunity: Pay attention to how long it takes them to get back to your request, and with what urgency and interest they place upon the opportunity. This can provide great, free insight into the focus they will put on promoting your business if the relationship were to become official.

Bringing Local Influencers Into Your Content Marketing Strategy

Benefits of Influencer Marketing

When it comes to the value of local brand influencer marketing, there are many important factors

to consider. After all, they’re not quite the same as pay per click (PPC) marketing campaigns… they don’t ‘turn off.’

Going after local business? Leverage the follower base of an area influencer!

Micro-influencers are walking, talking, breathing representations of your brand… for better or worse. When engaging a local brand ambassador, it’s important to observe both their behavior and relationship within the community they represent. Do they align with the values and perception you want attributed to your business?

A well-suited local brand influencer can catapult attention to your visibility in a targeted market. They have an already-established relationship with the audience you want to reach, and their commitment to the influencer represents an attachment and loyalty you want to emulate. Creators, sports figures or social media personalities have worked to garner their respective followings — and if you choose correctly, their devoted followers could become yours.

How To Know if Your Business is Ready to Invest in an Influencer:

So you’re considering a partnership with a local influencer. How do you know if your platform is ready to piggyback off of the name recognition of your intended brand? Here are the relevant answers you’ll need to know before reaching out.

  • Your products or services are ready and equipped to host a surge of new inquiries or customers.
  • You’re ready to leverage the trust of a micro influencer’s target audience to align with dependability in your business.
  • You want to increase the scope and reach of your client base, potentially attracting new demographics. (Remember, you’re exposing your business to a potentially untapped portion of a targeted geographical area!)
  • You have a set, steady following and are looking to increase your client load with the addition of relevant influencers.
Awesome-Salesman-selling-with-a-difference.

FMCG Macro-Micro Influencer Marketing Tactics To Acquire And Retain Consumers

In the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) sector, digital media is revolutionizing the landscape for marketers everywhere. Since most consumers use the internet to find and purchase products, FMCG products need to adapt.

This article focuses on how sellers of FMCGs can leverage micro-influencers to gain more customers.

What is FMCG?

Fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) are also known as consumer packaged goods (CPG). These are products that are in demand, quickly sold, and affordable. FMCGs include packed food, toiletries, beverages, and personal care products. Some highly perishable goods such as meat, dairy products, and fruits are also considered FMCGs.

What is a micro-influencer?

Micro-influencers are often identified based on the number of followers, which can range from 1000 to 100,00 depending on whom you ask. They also differ from macro-influencers because of their high engagement with their followers. But according to author Sam Fiorella, micro-influencers are better identified as people whose relationship with potential customers has considerable influence over their decision to purchase.

Benefits of Micro-Influencers to FMCG Marketing

 Affordability

Collaborating with a celebrity endorser will cost you hundreds of thousands just for one post. Unless you’re a huge company, this may not be feasible or desirable. Micro-influencers offer more affordable rates. Their pay may depend on the number of followers and engagement, but on average, the rates are around $100 to $500 per post.

Hiring micro-influencers will allow you to do more with your retail marketing budget and work with more than one influencer. This will also help you increase your reach to different customers.

 Niche markets

Often, the only way for your investment in influencer FMCG marketing to work is by finding one or more people who appeal to your target audience. Micro-influencers come in all shapes and forms. Each of them has a distinct area of specialization, style, brand, and audience. If, for example, you wish to market vegan products, it is only logical to find health-conscious influencers to represent your brand. Beyond Meat, known for plant-based food, partnered with celebrities and athletes and frequently use user-generated posts to advertise their products.

 Higher engagement and conversion

Micro-influencers communicate with their audience more often via regular posts, and they answer queries and comments more quickly. Research has shown that leveraging micro-influencers helps boost engagement rates by up to 8.8 percent. Because micro-influencers provide a more personalized customer experience, their efforts translate to a higher conversion rate.

How to integrate influencer marketing into your FMCG strategy

Identify brand goals

A good influencer marketing strategy begins with clear goals. Increased brand recognition and sales are the two most popular goals of implementing influencer marketing. But it is advisable to focus on the areas where your brand needs to grow instead of setting generic objectives. To establish relevant goals, study your existing FMCG marketing strategy and identify strengths and weaknesses.

Establish KPIs

Once you have identified goals, move on to determining key performance indicators (KPIs) that match your goals. KPIs include the number of unique users, sales per influencer, click-through rate, or leads generated. These will be the metrics you’ll track and analyze throughout your campaign. Continuously tweaking your strategy based on key performance metrics will result in gaining more loyal customers.

 Understand the influencer landscape

You’ll want to spend some time learning about the influencer landscape before you start working with influencers. Take some time to observe influencers and see how they promote brands before you look to pitch your brand to anyone. Another tactic is to create a shortlist of influencers and do background checks. You wouldn’t want your company to be associated with a person whose values are inconsistent with yours.

 Connect with influencers

There are many different ways to find the influencer you need. You can begin by researching your competitors’ FMCG marketing strategy and the market type you are operating in. This will give you an idea about who your competitors are working with and whom their influencers are targeting. Then, you can make a more strategic decision based on this.

Furthermore, you can search through hashtags to find people making sponsored posts. From there, you can look through their audience and see if that resonates with you. You can also start with your followers. Take a look at the people who are already following your brand on social media. Review the accounts they’re following to see if any influencers stand out.

Highlight your values

According to a study by Unilever, firms that use their consumer goods marketing strategy to achieve positive social impact enjoy twice as much growth as those that don’t. FMCG brands need to consider this when promoting their products. Since influencers are the face of your brand, choosing people who espouse your values is necessary. Brands that only focus on their products often have difficulty getting enough digital engagement.

Here’s how it works:

  1. You provide your ad assets. These can include images, logos, videos, descriptions and headline copy.
  2. Google automates your display ad campaign. By combining your assets and automatically resizing, reshaping and reorganizing them for different placements, Google helps create responsive display ads that look good in a variety of settings.
  3. Your responsive display ads live on the Google Display Network. Your fresh Google ad campaign is seen while current and potential customers browse the internet, watch YouTube videos, answer messages in Gmail and more.

That’s all it takes — no robot butler required. The best part is that you get to enjoy the benefits of automation without giving up control over image content, ad copy, headline structure or anything else we advertisers pour our blood, sweat and tears into. Plus, you don’t have to spend days or weeks worrying about ad format, ad size or even ad space — it’s incredibly advanced. 

Here are a few more benefits of responsive display ads:

  • Personalization: Different combinations of ad assets can be displayed to different audience segments. That way, you’re never limited by just one message, style or CTA (Call to Action) for your responsive display ads.
  • Optimization: Another impressive thing about Google display ads is that they’re optimized for each ad slot. Google looks at your assets and uses its machine learning model to decide what combination would work best for a certain location. For example, the same ad might be a banner on one website and a video on another.
  • Automation: I can’t say it enough — display campaign automation is impressive. It allows you to save the time, money and energy necessary to manually plan and design new ads for every placement. On top of that, it makes use of Google’s expansive algorithms for natural and intelligent brand promotion.

The Data on Responsive Display Ads

So, now you know what responsive display ads are — but do they actually work? Let’s take a look at what the data has to say.

The Good

Google has all kinds of reliable stats singing its own praises. Here are a few highlights from across various brands using the Google Display Network and a responsive display ad campaign:

  • 15.5 million impressions per month.
  • 40,000+ clicks per month.
  • 50% increase in sales.
  • 150% increase in bookings.
  • 29% increase in direct calls.

There’s no guarantee that you’ll see the same results as any of these companies.

The Not-So-Good

Hey, it can’t all be glowing results and amazing numbers, right?

The bad news is that, according to Statista, almost 26% of internet users were using adblocking software. That’s certainly not a majority, but it’s still a good chunk of people who may never see all the hard work you put into your responsive display ad — and that number is likely to increase over time.

Of course, as pointed out by a study from Carnegie Mellon University and the City University of Hong Kong, there are ways to use adblocking to your advantage — it just takes more work and a whole lot of know-how. For example, you could identify which ads are most consistently blocked and work on creating content users will consent to see.

The Takeaway

When all is said and done, the truth is that responsive display ads can be effective and have proven to be valuable tools in the ad campaign toolbelt. However, that can only happen if you put forth the effort to design the right image, headline and ad copy combination.

Mondo-Pasta-Advertisement.

Influencer marketing trends and stats from 2022 onwards

Influencer marketing trend 

#1: Pricing

Our report indicated that pricing was a core issue for both brands and influencers. Influencers struggled to know how much they should charge brands for their work and brands often felt that influencer fees were ‘quite high’.

Now that influencer marketing has matured as an industry, gone are the days where the fee would depend  largely on the number of followers an influencer had. Now, many variables come into play and as such, brands and influencers face confusion.

Brands and influencers need to consider factors like:

  • Audience data
  • Brand affinity
  • Quality of content
  • Content usage rights
  • Competitor clauses
  • Celebrity status

Influencer marketing trend 

#2: Content

Our survey indicated that both brand and influencers pay considerable thought to the quality of the content produced. Influencers feel that the quality of their content should play a role in deciding the fee they’re offered. Brands feel that the content they gain from influencers should match their own brand ethos.

This trend becomes even more prevalent when brands opt for boosting influencer content with paid social. As influencer content often performs better than brand-owned content, there’s a chance for brands to make their content go further by extending its lifespan through paid social content.

Paid media budgets for influencer content helps push content further by giving brands the freedom to promote the content to an audience they see fit. Now, they’re not bound by the constraints of how many followers the influencer has and can focus on the quality of content created. 

consumers look to influencers as a voice of authority, brands who leverage these relationships will win

Influencer marketing trend 

#3: Budget 

Of brands surveyed, 58% stated they planned to increase their influencer budgets now. Due to the 2020 global covid pandemic, influencers saw their value increase.

Brands with existing influencer partnerships have a degree of leverage and a safety net compared to those that don’t.

Fmcg-company-salesmen-analyse-consumer-needs-to-place-a-product

 Influencer Campaign Planning

The planning phase should be at the beginning of every single influencer marketing campaign – product or paid. During the planning phase, you should identify who your target audience is and what your campaign objectives are. Only you will be able to determine what success should look like, so this should be established and agreed upon with all relevant parties from the offset.

Sample Influencer Campaign Objectives:

  • Launch a product
  • Increase sales
  • Brand Awareness
  • Generate content

Sample Influencer Campaign KPIs

  • Uplift in sales
  • Increase in web traffic
  • Content generated
  • Increase in followers

Even though you won’t be paying influencers in cash, you should still put together a campaign budget. For a gifting campaign this means, the total value of stock you intend to gift and the cost of the stock. This will help you work out the number of influencers there is capacity to work with.

Campaign Guidelines & Influencer Agreement

Biggest fail in gifting collaboration? Thinking you don’t need to put together an influencer agreement.

Your influencer agreement should outline what you expect from the influencer in return for the gift. You should include: expected deliverables, time-frame, hashtags and handles required. Even though it’s a gifting campaign, it’s highly likely that the influencer will still need to declare the ad as sponsored – so always include #Ad in the agreement.

What to Include In Your Influencer Marketing Agreement

You may also wish to include some basic campaign guidelines – for example, the image style / mood or caption guidelines. As ever, we’d advise you to be as hands off as possible when it comes to creative styling so that the post remains authentic.

 How to Find The Right Influencers

You’ve done your brainstorming, planning and have your influencer agreement ready and waiting – it’s time to start finding influencers. Depending on the product value / coolness / desirability of your gift, you’ll need to think what is a suitable influencer size to approach i.e. gifting influencers diamonds has different value to a gifted lip balm.

Top 10 Gifting Influencers

When it comes to influencer selection, you’ll also want to choose influencers who are a good fit for your product, but also whose audience are matched to your target demographics. The core areas we suggest you look at, to determine whether or not to work with an influencer are:

  • Audience demographics – is the influencers audience aligned with your target market?
  • Average engagement – this will indicate the engagement you can expect for your images
  • Monthly audience growth – negative growth can indicate an un-engaged audience
  • Previous brand associations – does the influencer already work with brands similar to yours? This isn’t necessarily a bad thing

 Measuring Success of Your Gifting Campaign

Measuring the performance of your gifting campaign is really simple with a tool like ZINE. Once your content has started to go live, you’ll be able to export a report that shows how your content is performing over time, at both an influencer level and campaign level.

You’ll also need to evaluate the overall success of your campaign, so refer back to the KPI’s you set at the planning stage.

Box-Office-Hits-by-marketing-a-South-India-Film-Poster

Don’t Underestimate the Power of Visual Branding

The right visual branding can instantly draw customers in, attract top talent and empower internal teams. It can serve as a guiding force, keeping you aligned with your core values and inspiring you to take your business to greater heights.

What you see is what you get when it comes to visual branding. When a customer encounters your branded visuals, they’ll use that experience to make assumptions about your business.

To make a great first impression, you’ll need a brand image that communicates what you want your audience to know about your business, at a glance. Here’s what to do, and why it matters.

What Is Visual Branding?

Visual branding is an important facet of your marketing strategy. It consists of all the visual elements used to represent your business, from your logo to the font on your business cards. Each component works together to create the overall look and feel of your brand.

Your visual branding serves several purposes.

 Gold-craze-Gold-daze

First, it’s there to convey your brand personality and make an emotional impression on your audience.

Next, your brand’s visual identity will help your audience learn about your business. Potential customers use visual cues to understand:

  • Where your business fits in the market.
  • What makes your brand unique.
  • What they can expect from your products or services.

Finally, your visual branding approach will help unite the many fragments of your brand through consistent images. Whether your target customer looks at an email newsletter, Instagram post or brochure, shared visual branding elements will signal that it’s your business speaking.

Brand-KGF-a-block-buster-hit

Why Does Developing a Visual Brand Identity Matter for Your Business?

When customers shop around for businesses to work with, they are indeed judging the book by its cover. In other words, they’re evaluating your business based on its visual branding.

Why? Well, in many ways, the brand experience echoes the customer experience.

If a prospective client encounters a brand where quality and detail appear to matter, they will expect the same level of quality and attention to detail with your products or services. However, if your visual branding is on the sloppier side, they probably won’t anticipate top-notch service.

When your audience encounters visuals that signify a playful, fun brand personality, they’ll look forward to having a blast with your business. When they come across a more buttoned-up brand, they’ll know you take important matters seriously.

Your approach to visual branding can also say a lot about your position in the market. This is known as brand positioning. By representing your brand through high-end visuals and custom design work, you’re hinting that your audience can expect to pay a premium. If you’re just squeezing by with the bare minimum, this signals you have a smaller budget and, most likely, lower prices to match.

5 Main Elements of Visual Branding

The succsess of Vivek Agnihotri and The Kashmir Files

Your brand identity is made up of 5 key components:

  1. Logo.
  2. Typography.
  3. Color palette.
  4. Graphic elements.
  5. Imagery.

Let’s take a look at each of these visual branding essentials in detail:

Indian-Gold-Jewellery-Fmcg-brands

 Logo

Logo is an umbrella term that describes all visual elements used to identify or represent a brand. However your logo looks, it should be a unique signifier that introduces or reinforces your business name and brand personality. Consider it the “face” of your brand.

When you’re thinking about how to represent your brand visually, keep in mind that there are several different types of logo elements you can play with.

Source: Vecteezy.com

wordmark or logotype is one that is primarily composed of text, and usually features the brand’s name in a stylized font. For example, the cursive Coca-Cola logo and boxy FedEx logo are instantly recognizable wordmarks.

Another possible component is a brand mark or logomark, a pictorial image used to represent the brand. Think of the Target Bullseye or the Nike Swoosh.

Of course, some logos combine a wordmark and brand mark. Target’s use of bright red Helvetica text is just as memorable as the Bullseye brand mark. These two elements can be used together or separately, depending on the application.

You might also choose to add a tagline to your logo to explicitly state what your company does, where it’s located or when it was established.

Buffet-Cocktail-Vegetable-Momo

Typography

FMCG brands in India

When your brand has something to say, the way your text looks on the screen or page will add an additional level of meaning beyond the words themselves. Big, block letters will convey strength and stability; a swirling script might communicate elegance and tradition. That’s the magic of typography.

Typography is a science and visual art form related to the display of text. In terms of visual branding, it’s the specific brand fonts you choose and how you use them.

Graphic design experts often recommend pairing a sans serif font with a serif font to distinguish headers from body copy. The little tapering lines known as serifs can add an air of distinction to the text. But their absence can create a sleek, modern appearance. When used in tandem, both styles can give your brand messages a balanced feel.

British Airways embraces this technique, with a serif font used in the word mark and variations on Mylius Modern, a sans serif typeface, for other text. (Note the use of the Speedmarque here as well.)

 Color Palette

The color palette you select for your logo and other visual content will evoke an emotional response and contribute certain qualities and characteristics to your brand. In the language of colors, verdant greens can represent balance and nature, cool blues evoke a feeling of calm and sunny yellows suggest warmth and optimism. The colors you use, and how you combine them, will really set the mood.

Your core color palette could involve just a primary and secondary color, or several different hues. British Airways uses specific shades of blue, white and red as a nod to the Union Jack.

An extended color palette can give you more options when it comes to design. For instance, you might specify a light option, a dark option and several neutral hues that complement your core color palette. These help add depth to your primary color choices and complete the ambiance of a visual piece of branded content.

 Graphic Elements

Additional details that feel true to your brand can add dimension to your visual identity. When creating marketing collateral and other pieces of design, you can incorporate graphic design elements like:

  • Shapes.
  • Patterns.
  • Textures.
  • Negative and positive space.
  • Linework.
  • Icons.
  • Formatting.

These elements, of course, can be rendered in your brand color palette. They can even share similar visual qualities with your logo design and typography.

 Imagery

Finally, the photos and illustrations you include across your branded content should reinforce the same look and feel as the rest of the elements we’ve covered. Whether you use stock photography, original shots or custom graphics, these can help evoke your brand’s personality and values.

Each picture speaks a thousand words — so be sure that the people, places, products and props you feature communicate the right message.

As outlined in the British Airways brand guidelines, the airline prefers “epic panoramas” that evoke “the romance of travel.” It also encourages realistic product photography that clearly and realistically illustrates the function of a particular travel accessory.

The creative direction you choose for your images can also be influenced by your brand color palette. The cb2 brand centers on dramatic, high-contrast hues and geometric shapes. Accordingly, the retailer uses imagery that exhibits these colors and qualities in their catalogs and Instagram posts.

Characteristics of a Good Visual Identity

A successful visual identity will make a great first impression with your audience. From then on, it can boost brand awareness and resonance throughout the customer lifecycle.

Here are the most important visual branding characteristics:

It’s Meaningful

Your visual brand is an important communication tool. So, the visual “language” you use should help reinforce your brand personality and marketing messages. Colors, fonts and images represent different emotions and attributes, meaning it’s important to choose elements that express the right meaning for your brand.

It’s Memorable

In order to promote brand recognition, you’ll want a visual brand identity that is recognizable and memorable.

Including concrete or abstract visual cues that connect your business to your industry or services is a helpful way to communicate who you are and what you do.

Or, if your business is just starting out, including a wordmark in your logo will help reinforce your brand name. If you just use a brand mark, viewers might remember the unique image but not the name itself. That won’t come in handy when they try to find you on Google.

It’s Simple

Your logo and other visuals should stand out from the competition, but they should be simple enough for your audience to remember easily.

When people were asked to draw car logos from memory, the most simple, streamlined logos proved easiest to recall. There were a lot more accurate logo sketches for Audi than Alfa Romeo — and some very poorly drawn Ferrari horses. But the fact that 82% of participants actually attempted to illustrate the Prancing Horse is a good sign for brand awareness.

It’s Versatile

Incorporating practical and versatile elements into your visual branding approach will make it easier to promote consistency. After all, the same visual brand identity will need to appear across all branded assets. Depending on your business, these might include your:

  • Website.
  • Advertisements.
  • Social media content.
  • Print materials.
  • Product labeling and packaging.
  • Email communications.
  • Business cards.
  • Mobile app.
  • Branded merchandise.
  • Staff uniforms.
  • Office or storefront design.
  • Service vehicles.

Here’s what this means in practical terms. You might get excited about using a color gradient on your website. But, if you’re in the construction industry, and you have a construction-themed website, you’ll quickly realize it won’t be affordable (or possible) to order screen printed hard hats, mesh safety vests or embroidered polo shirts with that gradient. Another texture or pattern would be more adaptable.

It’s Consistent

Last but not least, ensuring visual consistency is key. Whether customers first meet your brand on social media or by spotting your service van on their street, they should have the same brand experience. Once you’ve established a meaningful, memorable, simple and versatile brand image, use it to create cohesion across different visual touchpoints.

A Quick Tour of the Visual Branding Process

Whether you’re taking a DIY approach with your own set of branding tools or partnering with a brand agency, the steps in the visual branding process will look fairly similar:

  1. Articulate your brand personality and how it relates to your business goals and values.
  2. Conduct market research to understand your competitors’ visual branding approaches and what your target audience will be looking for.
  3. Gather inspiration and collect visual references through moodboards, sketches, mockups and other exercises.
  4. Create logo design options that could represent your brand, then choose the one that feels like the right fit.
  5. Select other visual elements that work well with your logo and complete your visual brand.
  6. Develop a brand style guide to document your strategy and ensure visual consistency moving forward.

The brand style guide is the all-important deliverable your visual branding project will conclude with. Here’s an example from the British Airways brand guidelines.

What To Consider When Creating YouTube Videos

Let’s be real here: No one wants — or has the time — to listen to you talk about a topic for 60 minutes. So when it comes to YouTube video length, the shorter the better. Trust us when we say viewers don’t want to hear your life story; they just want the answer that your video is providing. Therefore, to create a killer YouTube video, you need to cut the fluff, get straight to the point and grab the viewer’s attention right from the get-go.

Ideally, a YouTube video should be between 6 and 8 minutes long. Most video marketers agree that you risk losing viewers once your video goes over 10 minutes. Vidyard reports that long video length deters 59.9% of people from watching. And according to YouTube statistics from FortuneLords, 20% of the people who start a video leave after the first 10 seconds. That means when it comes to creating video content, you need to make every second count.

Think about it this way: Imagine asking someone a specific question, but rather than providing a fast answer, they spend 13 minutes talking about things related to your question. Frustrating, isn’t it? Chances are, even if you eventually get an answer, you’re not going to ask them a question again in the future. The same can be said for YouTube videos: If creators don’t get straight to the point, they’re not going to grow their subscriber list.

Different Lengths for Different Types of Videos

Of course, the 6 to 8-minute idea is a rule of thumb that might not apply to every type of YouTube video. Determining the exact length of your YouTube video will depend on factors such as your:

  • Topic or industry.
  • Target audience age and geographic location.
  • Video goals.While you might aim for your video to fall between 6 and 8 minutes in length, feel free to check out comparable videos. If it seems like similar videos tend to be 12 minutes long but still achieve a lot of engagement — such as likes, comments and shares — then you may want your video to match.Additionally, consider the type of YouTube video you’re creating to determine the optimal length:

Commentary YouTube Videos

A commentary video is when someone with knowledge about a particular topic, trend or industry discusses it. The focus isn’t so much on the creator as it is on the subject matter at hand. Viewers are seeking to learn something specific, so these videos should include concise intros and outros. If the video is part of a series, you’ll want to feature a brief recap — no longer than 30 seconds — at the beginning.

Tutorial YouTube Videos

Tutorial videos provide clear how-to instructions for a specific topic. According to TechSmith, instructional videos should be under 20 minutes in length. Additionally, TechSmith’s 2021 report on video statistics, habits and trends found that the majority of people prefer informational videos to be 3 to 4 minutes or 5 to 6 minutes in length, and fewer than 10% of viewers prefer instructional videos over 20 minutes.

Listicle YouTube Videos

The length for a listicle YouTube video will vary depending on how many points you’re covering. For these types of videos, engagement is critical. While you may have a number of points to talk through, you’ll be able to keep viewers watching if you provide content in a concise manner. Cut out extra fluff — like an unnecessarily long intro — and get straight to the list.

MsMojo does a great job of creating engaging YouTube listicle videos — and her 4 million subscribers would agree. While her videos vary in length, they provide content in a straightforward and well-formatted manner. Here’s a prime example:

YouTube Videos vs. Videos on Other Platforms

While YouTube is the supreme leader of video content — Hootsuite reports that 74% of U.S. adults use the platform — other social media channels also distribute video content. If you choose to create a Facebook, TikTok or Instagram video, you’ll want to make sure your video length matches what users on that platform want to see.

For example, this Facebook Video Study from Socialinsider found that the optimal length for a Facebook video is between 2 and 5 minutes. However, Influencer Marketing Hub reports that while TikTok creators can make videos up to 3 minutes long, the ideal length for a TikTok video ad is 9 to 15 seconds and the majority of viral TikTok videos do not exceed 60 seconds.

Your Recipe for YouTube Success

When creating the perfect YouTube video, keep these 3 tips in mind:

  1. Grab attention with a killer intro.
  2. Get to the meat and potatoes of your video quickly — no fluff needed.
  3. Create playlists to organize your videos for a better user experience.

When you keep your viewer intent at the forefront of your video content strategy, you’ll create YouTube videos that captivate your target audience, resulting in more views and subscribers.

More than half of the world’s population now uses social media. These are content consumers who may just be part of the target audience for your brand. But how can you harness social media for optimal user traction?

When it comes to getting your brand out into the world, choosing between the array of social media platforms may be intimidating. That’s why we’re breaking down 2 of the top contenders: Snapchat vs. Instagram. This could be quite the showdown, so let’s take a good hard look at both platforms, what they offer your brand — and what they don’t!

Snapchat and Instagram 101: Everything You Should Know

Both Snapchat and Instagram are social platforms that offer users photo-messaging and photo-sharing capabilities, respectively. They’ve both been around since the early 2010s and have since been adopted globally.

Snapchat is primarily a direct messaging platform where images and videos are available to recipients for a short period of time. Snapchat users can post these short-term videos for their friends and followers to view before they expire and become inaccessible. While the app’s purpose may be to share fun photos, there are plenty of other features of the app for users to play with — we’ll get into those in just a moment!

Instagram — which is owned by Meta (formerly Facebook) — is a photo and video sharing network where content is open to all followers rather than sent through direct messages. Within the app, there are opportunities to tune into live videos, scroll through image posts and view stories that expire after 24 hours have passed. Stories, images and posts can also be sent via Instagram’s direct messaging feature to friends and other Instagrammers.

Let’s take this further by breaking down the features of both apps before we get into making them work for your brand.

Features When ‘Snapping’

Snapchat’s focus may be in person-to-person content sharing, but there are additional elements that its users enjoy.

A Snapchat story can be posted to any user’s profile for all of their followers to view. The “Discovery” page is where short-term content from other accounts and brands is displayed for perusal — including everything from news sources to food videos. If you’re a fan of Buzzfeed Tasty content but have blown through their episodes, you may find other food-related videos living on the Discovery page alongside other brands.

Not only can a Snapchat user send friends fun pics with filters (ever want to know what you would look like with a rainbow coming out of your mouth?) and direct messages, but they can also play Snapchat games with friends with augmented reality or even their own face. This app offers a huge array of features, from sending vanishing pictures to viewing your friends’ locations around the world and tuning into Snaps published in certain areas.

Instagram Features

Not to be outdone, Instagram comes equipped with a host of user-friendly tools. Instagram users can share their photos and videos on their main feed — complete with filters, geo-tagged content and hashtags. On the user feeds, an Instagram Story is available to view in a 24-hour window. While Instagram and Snapchat have similar features, their editorial abilities set the ‘gram’ apart. Content comes accompanied by a caption — a whopping 2,200 characters maximum — and tagging features for similar content discoverability.

Instagram Live allows users to watch their favorite celebrities, brands and even friends as they capture real-time footage. This isn’t to be confused with Instagram TV, a feature where personal and business accounts upload longer videos — even up to an hour — that are then made available to users based on their activity and interests. Instagram Reels are quick videos, often set to music, where short and engaging videos can be shared without a 24-hour expiration stamp.

User Profiles

Instagram’s 2 billion monthly users do surpass Snapchat’s 500 million monthly users, a clear statement about the former’s popularity.

But let’s dig deeper into these numbers — there’s a lot more to them.

Audience age is an important consideration when it comes to these apps. Users aged 18-34 make up the majority of Instagram’s population, far outranking younger and older demographics. Over 70% of Instagram users fall into that age-range worldwide. Snapchat, on the other hand, is a little more evenly distributed with an audience that skews younger. Users aged 13-34 make up 82% of Snapchat’s demographic. On both apps, young adults reign supreme — great news if that’s your ideal demographic.

Remember, there’s a likelihood that these numbers have some overlap, as social media users tend to be on multiple apps. It then becomes a question of making this information and the various features work best for your brand.

Marketing on Instagram: Benefits and Drawbacks

We can’t tell you directly if taking your brand to Instagram is the right choice, but we can provide you with some of the key benefits and drawbacks other businesses have faced on Instagram’s platform.

Benefits of Marketing on Instagram

There are a few clear benefits of creating Instagram content. The app offers:

  • A larger population: Instagram does have a clear majority when it comes to getting brand messaging out there. The more users you can reach, the more likely it is that you’ll see your content gain traction and benefit from a wider viewing audience.
  • A visual marketing paradise: If your brand excels in visuals, marketing on Instagram may be a more natural fit for you. This social media platform is ideal for attractive photos and eye-catching videos while being unobtrusive among other content.
  • A variety of content strategies: Whether you’re interested in getting your content out in digestible bites or producing long-term content that will live on your grid forever, Instagram has options for you. From Instagram Reels to Instagram Live, you can reach your target audience in numerous ways.
  • An editorial addition: Telling your brand’s story in 2,200 characters or less gives your product or service a lot of space to evolve. Captions can help you connect with your audience and drive organic traction through hashtags.
  • Endless possibilities: The only limits are your own imagination on Instagram. From educational information to collaborations, case studies and even outsourced user and influencer content, your options are wide open.

Drawbacks of Marketing on Instagram

While you may feel that these numerous Instagram benefits are like opening your very own personalized brand toolbox, be a little cautious of these bright and shiny tools. It can be possible to overuse them and create negative associations of your brand. A few of these include:

  • Too much content may overwhelm users, especially if you’re constantly spamming content that’s not well thought out.
  • Piecemeal brand assets that don’t flow with your overall aesthetic and voice may fall flat when attempting to connect with customers.
  • A lack of cohesive brand assets will make a brand’s Instagram look unprofessional and unattractive.

Make sure your brand has a schedule and a system for posting, and that every new piece of content is bright, professional and aesthetically thematic. Girl, LASH’s Instagram success story is one that might resonate and give you some inspiration.

Marketing on Snapchat: Benefits and Drawbacks

Don’t discount Snapchat just because the main design is more personal with direct messaging — that may just be one of the biggest benefits it brings!

Benefits of Marketing on Snapchat

Here are a few of the top benefits Snapchat brings to the table:

  • Smaller population = more targeted content: Just because Snapchat isn’t as big as some other social media platforms doesn’t mean it’s not a powerhouse in its own right. In fact, a smaller population may be the ticket to making your content stick.
  • Geographic targets: With geotags and physical locations as primary features on Snapchat, brands can create region- and even city-specific content for a larger, more localized impact.
  • A smaller, close-knit vibe: Of the social media sites, Snapchat users don’t typically turn to the app for news. Instead, they go to have fun and connect with friends. Brands that want to join this community may find a home on Snapchat.
  • Filters for brand style: Filters — from the ones Snapchat users apply to their photos and videos to Community Tags — offer creative and fun ways for users to connect with brands. These features are also an opportunity to demonstrate your brand’s graphic design chops!

Drawbacks of Marketing on Snapchat

Be aware of what the short-term nature of Snapchat can mean for your brand — and how you’ll have to customize your brand’s output to combat the ephemeral content.

  • Short-lived content will require more creativity to keep your brand relevant and noticeable.
  • Producing more content more consistently helps combat the quick-view nature of this social media app.
  • A smaller user base may mean your brand’s target demographic isn’t represented, and you may struggle to reach the right consumers.
Jackie-Shroff-in-Charminar-Cigarettes-Advt

 Brand Assets Every Company Should Have.

 Find Out What Content is Useful for Your Brand

This one applies to all forms of sales collateral. What type of social proof and sales collateral will help your prospects feel more confident about spending money with you? I’ll walk you through a few steps that will help you figure out what sales enablement content can make a difference for your brand:

Meet with sales on a regular basis

Salespeople are on the frontline of your industry and have a sense of what will help them close more deals. They don’t always know what type of content is useful to them, but they always have ideas, and most of those ideas are worth exploring. Figure out what types of content make a difference at the point of sale from their experience.

Scope out your competitors

This is something you should do in any type of content audit. Look specifically at 1) your closest market rivals and 2) industry leaders. While you may not compete directly with the latter, you can get a better sense of the types of social proof other companies are using, and how they’re distributing it.

Look at your branded searches

Nine times out of 10, searching for a brand in Google will pull up some sort of review or rating of that brand. That’s a decent place to start.

Search results for “Brafton”
Search results for a sushi place nearby.

If you want to get really scientific, hop into Google Search Console and figure out your most common branded search terms. Conduct those searches to figure out what sorts of ratings and reviews are being tacked onto your brand’s web presence. This will help guide your priorities.

Look at referral traffic in Google Analytics

Don’t skip this step. Most of what’s being said about your brand happens off your site. Directories you’ve never heard of could be having a huge influence on your company’s reputation.

To see your referral traffic, open Google Analytics. In the left-hand menu select:

Acquisitions > All Traffic > Referrals.

Set your time period to at least a few months to get a good sample size. Look at the list of referrals, paying close attention to the top sources of referral traffic, and just as importantly, to referral conversions:

Three of the top-10 sources of referral traffic to our site over the past few months are business directories. And of those three, one source has more than double the conversion rate, and conversion value, of the others: Clutch.co.

This is no accident. When we first noticed that we were generating conversions through Clutch, we began using it as a way to collect social proof by asking our clients to leave us reviews. Consequently, we started earning more conversions. We also got a bunch of great new reviews with quotes that we could use as we created case studies.

Pro tip: There’s more than one way to get on Page 1 for important keywords. For instance, Clutch is the No. 1 organic search result for “top content marketing agencies.” If a user clicks that result and looks at Clutch’s Leaders’ Matrix, they’ll see Brafton. That’s really good for us. Find out what directories have that type of value in your industry, and own them.

 Document All Your Social Proof Opportunities

Think of every possible client as a “lead” for social proof.

We’ll go over methods for how to “qualify” and “target” those leads. But first, you need a system for tracking who you’re targeting, and for which type of social proof.

For this purpose, I’m sharing the spreadsheet template that we use to track all of our social proof efforts. Here it is. I’ll walk you through each column:

  • Permission to contact: Don’t go around contacting clients asking them for things without permission from the account rep. Timing is important.
  • First- and second-choice ask: What type of social proof is the priority for you from a particular client? What’s your second choice if that first option falls through? I’ve prefilled these with drop-down options to choose from, but feel free to edit them to suit your own social proof types. To change the drop-down selections, select the cells you want to edit. Then click into “Data > Data Validation.” Adjust the “list of items” by adding or removing the text you’d like to display in your drop down:
  • Contact (s): Who specifically should you reach out to on the client side?
  • Restrictions: Is there anything in the client’s contract that would prohibit them from participating in social proof, for instance a non-disclosure agreement?
  • Decks/data: Link to any data you might have access to about the work you’ve done for your client. This could be quantitative (ROI decks) or qualitative (glowing feedback from the latest customer satisfaction survey). This can be useful in helping you decide what type of social proof to target.
  • Status: Document your outreach efforts here. Include dates, like so: “sent request for case study interview 12/13.” This will help you stay organized as you juggle different leads.
  • Notes: Anything important worth documenting that doesn’t fit in another column. We often use this to denote the specific product or service that the social proof is about.
  • Thank you gift: Some forms of social proof ask more of the client than others. Make sure you know which requests are the most demanding, and that you send thank you gifts to the clients who acquiesce.

 Collaborate Closely With Customer Experience Account Reps

This part is the key to getting those aforementioned leads.

Your customer experience folks (project managers, account reps, etc.) know who’s happy, and they can help you target the people who will sing your praises the loudest.

So how do you get your customer experience team involved? Here’s what’s worked for us:

  • Make social proof a KPI. Customer satisfaction is one thing. Brand advocacy from those customers is an even better thing. Reward customer reps when their clients leave reviews or participate in case studies. This will require direct collaboration and buy-in from your head of customer success. You’re just a marketer, after all. You can’t impose KPIs on another department without support from the head of that department.
  • Meet with them on a regular basis — at least once a quarter, but preferably more. Spend 30 minutes talking through your goals and targets. Explain why you’ve set those goals, and remind them of how they can help you hit them.
  • Send out a monthly survey. Create a simple Google Form that asks each customer rep to include a few examples of clients who are thrilled with your company’s work. At Brafton, we send this out to Project Managers once a month. They’re closest to clients and deliverables, and can provide leads on clients who are most likely to participate in social proof and leave us great reviews.
  • Show endless gratitude. Project managers, account managers, customer success managers — whatever the title, they’re busy doing their jobs, which is making their customers happy. Every extra minute they give you is time out of their day. Make sure that you show your appreciation, even though it also helps them in the end, and even if it is a KPI.

Use Automation Wisely

Automation is easier for some companies than others. A SaaS provider can send automated emails, or even occasional automated notifications, requesting a user review. You’ll almost certainly get some reviews, especially if you have thousands of users.

But even then, you might find that the most vocal reviewers are the discontented minority. Relying entirely on automation can be risky, in this sense, and you may have to supplement your efforts with manual outreach.

If you offer a more involved service, like consulting, web development or content marketing, it’s the exact opposite: Automation plays a supporting role. Here’s what that might look like:

  • Automatic customer satisfaction surveys: We send these out at the end of every scope of work. We ask clients to rate their experience with us, and in the final question, we ask if they’d be willing to act as a reference. If they say yes (and rated us positively), our marketing team gets in touch to ask about participating in a case study or leaving a review — especially if they’ve renewed their contract with us. You could easily do something similar with your own marketing automation software.
  • Click-to-send email requests: We’ve gotten more Google Reviews in the past 6 months than in the past 6 years. How? We drafted an email that asks for a Google Review, and programmed it into our email automation system. Consider this scenario. An account manager gets off a weekly client call and that client has nothing but great things to say about the most recent deliverable. The account manager should strike while the iron is hot. And they can, by sending out that Google Review request with the click of a few buttons in Salesforce.

 Think About How You’ll Frame a Social Proof Request to the Customer

Targeting the right clients at the right time (when they’re happiest) is by far the best strategy to get someone to participate in a case study or testimonial.

But it’s worth thinking about who will ask the client and how — does it make more sense to have someone from your marketing team reach out, or to have the customer rep bring it up at the next call? Maybe it’s both. Should you offer some sort of incentive?

Here’s an example of an email that we sent out a while ago requesting a review, after the account manager floated the idea by the client on a call:

And here’s the response:

So in the end, we got a glowing review and a case study out of this. Everything sort of clicked here for the following reasons:

  • We targeted a loyal client that we know we’ve done great work with over the years.
  • We had buy-in and support from our rep managing the account, who floated the question by the client before I even reached out.
  • We provided an incentive as backup.

In our case, the incentive we used is a backlink and a brand mention. It works, because we primarily deal with digital marketing managers who know first-hand how hard it can be to build backlinks. In your case, it might make more sense to offer a temporary discount, or perhaps even provide a free trial of a particular service or product.

But again, the incentive is only a piece of the puzzle. If you’ve gotten buy-in from your customer teams and have done a good job setting up a system to collect, qualify and document social proof leads, most of the clients you target will leave you a review without needing the incentive.

 Create Your Social Proof

The best practices that go into creating a great case study or video testimonial are numerous enough that they can fill entirely separate articles of their own. In the interest of not taking up too much more of your time, I’ll simply provide a very brief but essential checklist of best practices:

  • Keep the story simple and to the point; resist the urge to be overly descriptive or “cute” with your writing. The success story is the star here.
  • Highlight hard data; feature it in the title, and at the top of your case study if you can.
  • Structure the story concisely and sensibly: Intro, Challenge, Solution, Outcome.
  • Feature one or two examples of the work you did.
  • Get the customer’s voice in there, and if possible, their image as well.
  • Feature the logo prominently, and include the client’s name in the title.

Distributing & Promoting Your Sales Collateral

Now that you have some sales collateral, what should you do with it? Let’s discuss:

Internal Distribution

Sales collateral needs to be promoted internally within your company and externally. And this is one of those rare instances where internal distribution is more important than external distribution.

Because as I said many words ago, sales collateral does its heaviest lifting late in the marketing and sales cycle. It’s mostly there for your salespeople to distribute at the point of sale. And for them to do that, they have to know that the collateral exists and where to find it.

Here are a few methods that have worked for us:

1. First and foremost, turn social proof into slides that salespeople can use at the point of sale. If sales is presenting decks at the point of sale, they should have every case study and testimonial in a slide format. A great pitch deck contains everything within it (meaning no need to look elsewhere for answers) — and that includes the social proof.

2. Inform the entire sales team every time you launch a new case study, new case study slides, a new testimonial, a new slide deck dedicated to a particular product, or any other form of sales enablement content. We have a dedicated Workplace group for our sales and account managers to notify them of new sales collateral. We also make a point to remind sales and account managers where all of this collateral lives several times a quarter. That may seem redundant, but new hires and busy schedules necessitate that redundancy.

3. Create and distribute a centralized location for great examples of client work. It’s very possible that sales has a system in place for gathering examples of your company’s great work, as is the case with us. The only way you’ll know is to talk to them. If there is something they need help with, make sure that you have a central location where you can update any new examples and notify sales once you’ve done so. For instance, we create dozens of new client videos every month. Sales doesn’t have the time to go through all those videos, pick out the best ones and upload them to our YouTube account. So instead, our lead video editor flags the best videos he comes across each month. Our marketing team then uploads those videos, and notifies sales once they’re live on YouTube.

External Distribution

Obviously, you want to get as many eyes as possible on your case studies, testimonials, reviews and other public-facing sales collateral and social proof. There are a few ways to do this:

1. Share case studies and testimonials on all of your usual distribution channels (email, social media, etc.). For video testimonials, also upload them to YouTube. Tag your client on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter when you share your case study or testimonial.

2. Feature case studies, testimonials and great reviews on relevant landing pages. We have panels like the one below on most of our product landing pages:

3. Make sure your social proof is super easy to find on your site. Feature it in your main navigation under a non-ambiguous header.

4. Put it in your email signature: Putting a rating with links to dozens of glowing reviews about your company in an email signature is one of the easiest ways to get your social proof in front of every lead and prospect that your sales team talks to. Here’s an example the signature we recently came up with:

Measuring Success

It’s notoriously difficult to document the precise impact your content has on sales. This is especially true for any slides that you create at the point of sale. In theory, you might be tempted to look at close rates, time to close and other sales KPIs. And who knows, depending on your market, there may be a direct correlation between your sales collateral efforts and those KPIs.

But for most industries, that’s going to be a difficult correlation to establish. There are so many mitigating factors when it comes to sales numbers, and we haven’t yet figured out exactly how to isolate hard data that unequivocally correlates to sales enablement’s impact on the most crucial KPIs.

However, there are a few key metrics that you should absolutely pay attention to as you measure the success of your sales collateral. They include:

Number of reference requests from sales: One of the things we immediately noticed as we bulked up on sales collateral is that we got far fewer reference requests. When sales has all the proof — rave reviews, case studies and testimonials — right there in front of the prospect, there’s less urgency for those prospects to go asking questions that you’ve already answered in your sales enablement content.

Your goal conversion path: In Google Analytics, click on conversions in the left-hand menu. Go to “Goals,” and then select “Reverse Goal Paths.” Once there, select one of your macro conversion goals (e.g. your “contact us” or “schedule a demo” type goals that indicate potential intent to buy).

From this view, you’ll be able to see the page where the user converted plus the pages the user looked at leading up to those conversions. Ideally, as you add more social proof to your site, you’ll also see its impact on lead generation:

Referral traffic conversions: Remember we talked about referral traffic and conversions as being a good way to see where you may already be getting reviewed and discovered on the web? As you gather more reviews on the platforms that matter, pay attention to the impact those wins have on referral traffic and on conversions. Again, it doesn’t tell you much about sales, but it’s nice to see that work contributing to new leads.

Feedback from sales: There are a few ways to get feedback on your sales enablement efforts from sales. You could seek it anonymously in a survey if you’re worried that they might not be honest with you. Or you could just ask them on your regular check-in call (which you absolutely should have). The goal here is to get a sense of whether your work is helping, how it’s helping and what else you might be able to contribute.

There is A LOT of data that we’ve yet to mine to really measure the impact of our sales enablement efforts. But we will, and we’ll report back with advice on how to do this once we have.

Wrapping Up

I know what you’re thinking: This sounds like a full-time job.

And I’ll level with you: It can feel that way in the early goings. The hardest part is laying those foundational elements — buy-in from customer teams, your social proof “lead-gen” efforts, an organized system for tracking social proof efforts, setting up the automated feedback and review-request mechanisms, getting a monthly or quarterly meeting on the books with sales.

But it all becomes a part of your standard operating procedure over time. It starts to happen without you really thinking about it. Like muscle memory.

Plus, you have a head start because you read this behemoth of a blog post.

So push through these early goings, and trust me when I say that it only gets easier from here.

Tail Piece:
The devil lies in the detail…
Thinking-differently-fmcg-salesmen-for-varied-result

Team DigitalGumma

A Professional Team Of Over 25 years of experience in Sales & Marketing operations, Channel (Direct & Indirect) Development and Distribution, and Key Account Management in the FMCG Sector. AREAS OF EXPERTISE Sales & Marketing: Conceptualizing and implementing sales promotional strategies as a part of brand building and market development effort. Business Development: Handling infrastructure development of sales & distribution systems and increasing coverage & penetration to have maximum market share. Channel Management: Identifying and networking with financially strong and reliable dealers/channel partners, Super Stockist, C&F resulting in deeper market penetration and reach. Ensuring cost-effective logistic operations & seamless materials movement to ascertain sufficient inventory levels at each sales outlet/ distribution channel. Evaluating performance & monitoring distributor sales and marketing activities. DigitalGumma.com website has everything you need to create a fully personalized, high-quality free showcase website. Get the word out about all the amazing things you’re doing. Easily email your contacts or share on social media to tell everyone you know. Sell Anything Anywhere To Anyone. DigitalGumma.com is a business development platform motivated to ideate connect propagate to millions of users worldwide. Create a beautiful, professional web presence. Our expert team members collaborate across digital marketing specialties to produce powerful results. Build your next digital marketing plan utilizing the latest internet technology, explode your online presence with a Fully Managed SEO program, and maximize your profits.

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