Ofcom recently found smartphone penetration has reached 58% in the UK, overtaking Japan as the largest consumer of mobile data. This is great news for businesses because there’s a growing opportunity to reach customers wherever they are. The next step is that businesses need to embrace that opportunity.
When running a digital marketing campaign there are a number of things to think about. Firstly your audience and where they are, that will help you to decide which channels you should be using – and don’t forget to consider the newest ones as well as the more traditional. Secondly, in the age of mobile, your campaign needs to work just as well on a mobile device as it does on the desktop. Underlying all of this is that newer channels such as social media have changed the way we communicate and how customers expect to be communicated with – text, sound, pictures and video can all be used to share content. This can all sound like a lot of channels and tools but they all have a place in the modern marketing toolbox, you just need to understand how to use them to best effect.
Take the recently launched Vine, Twitter’s proprietary service which enables users to upload six-second long videos. Sharing video content online is not a revolution but neither was sharing photos, until Instagram changed the way people and brands looked at it. Content marketing should be at the top of any businesses’ marketing agenda and Vine is set to be video’s Instagram.
With that in mind we have come up with some tips to help SMEs get the best out of Vine:
- Watch the tutorial. It’s built into the app, it’s free and it explains how to use the application. If you haven’t spent a few minutes learning how to use Vine, you probably aren’t using it correctly.
- Experiment. This channel calls for businesses to try different things. For example, if you are launching a new service you might want to show a before and after shot within the video, so that customers can easily and quickly understand what value they will get from it.
- Do not spam. Every new user on Vine thinks this is their opportunity to achieve social media stardom and consequently we’re seeing swathes of hashtags and inaccurate descriptions on Vine. If you are using Vine for marketing, you want to ensure that everything you do can only positively impact your brand. There’s a general etiquette to hashtagging, learn it and remember that once you’ve lost a customer, it is very difficult to get them back.
- Brand your videos. You have six seconds to make a video; saving half a second for a brand logo and call to action could be the difference between just providing great content and actually making a sale.
- Extend the reach. So you’re posting on Vine and consequently on Twitter. Why does the reach of your content stop there and why should it only be found by those on Twitter and Vine? Use an email client that enables you to link your social media campaigns and print QR codes to your videos to ensure that everything you publish via Vine is automatically posted to all your social media channels. The joy of digital marketing is integration, don’t waste the opportunity.
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