Dana Davis | GrowMap

Video Creation: Essential in the Work Place

Most companies in the past never worried about video creation unless they were releasing a TV commercial.

While that was fine years ago, research shows that video creation is becoming essential in the workplace.

Use video to get your business noticed through streaming
websites and other avenues of video distribution.

There are many advantages to creating videos, and employees will soon be expected to do this as part of their usual workload.

Video Creation Surges in Popularity

Videos have always been popular on the Internet, but they surged when streaming video was created.

That popularity is increasing every year as new technology comes out that makes it even easier to create, host and distribute video.

Close to 40 percent of all Internet activity involves video streaming, and this is why it’s important for businesses.

You want to communicate with your audience as easily as possible. You also want to access the largest number of people at once.

The best way to do this is through video creation.

Increase Conversions

Another benefit of video creation is that it significantly increases the likelihood of someone buying a product or service.

Many reports show that prospects are about 70 percent more likely to buy whatever you are selling if you present it through a video.

There are several reasons for this. One of the big reasons is that the prospect gets to see the product in action, or he or she can hear your representative talk.

This allows the customer to build an emotional connection, and it enables him or her to see details of the product that might have been difficult to view with photos.

Another reason for this is because videos seek to educate the customer. Many people have an easier time learning about a subject if someone talks to them about it, and you can use this to your advantage with video creation.

Video Creation is Simple

Video creation is starting to enter the workplace because it’s becoming simple. Many tools offer free templates now.

You used to need incredibly expensive lighting, recording hardware and a lot of other equipment.

While all of this equipment is still needed for big-budget advertising videos, you can easily create a video with nothing more than a simple camera and editing software.

The barrier to entry with video creation is steadily becoming lower. There are an increasing number of video creation apps suitable for non-professionals.

This means that your employees will soon be able to create marketable videos as easily as they create reports and other common documents.

Look at video creators. Julie compared InVideo and RenderForest here.

And then she elaborated on the pros and cons of Renderforest in this video:

Affordable Marketing

Video creation is becoming much more affordable since you don’t need as much hardware or software as you formerly did.

Not only that, but training an employee to film and edit a video is fairly easy.

You can easily create your own videos without having to outsource them to experts if you just want a simple video to place on your social media page.

Build Relationships

Customers are demanding an emotional relationship with the businesses that they buy from.

If they don’t emotionally connect with you, then they might not be loyal to your brand.

There are many ways of doing this, but one way is to introduce customers to the workers via videos.

Videos allow customers to see employees that they usually
wouldn’t meet under other circumstances, and this builds
a bond between the business and the customer.

Video creation allows you to show the customer around the business, and you can also make videos to show that you care about them.

Consistent Message

The last reason why video creation is becoming common in the workplace is because it allows you to present a consistent message that won’t change.

It doesn’t matter how many times someone watches the video. The message will never change.

This allows you to say exactly what you want in the best manner possible.

Conclusion

Video creation is becoming essential in the workplace because it has many benefits and advantages.

If you aren’t currently doing video marketing, then you should consider doing it.

This can help improve your profit margin, and it might also reduce your marketing costs if you are outsourcing all of your video creation.

Originally published 4/1/13. Updated 3/11/23 to remove outdated content, improve formatting for mobile devices, and add new resources.

Video and music blogger Flynn Star shared this with our readers.

Image Credit: Marketoonist Business Cartoons ~ For Sale for Commercial Purposes ~ Free to Use in Blogs with attribution and link.

How to Improve Your Rankings When Your To-Do List Is Already Packed

You know your website rankings are important. If you didn’t, you probably wouldn’t be reading this in the first place, right?

Even with that knowledge, though, finding a way to get it done can be a challenge.

Who has time to focus on their website when there is so much to do?

You need to deal with the finances, hire and train people, create products, market those products or services, network, and so on.

If you have a family, you probably want to spend some time with them, as well. And at some point, you probably want to sleep.

How, then, can you find the time to:

- create and optimize content
- do keyword research
- build domain authority
- generate inbound links
- and do everything else your website needs you to do?

The answer is simpler than you might think: outsource.

Outsourcing is hiring an expert to manage parts of your business – or even your personal life – that you either don’t have the time to do, don’t have the skills to do, or simply do not want to do.

If you don’t have the time, energy, or expertise to pour into your website, an SEO company like Vazoola.com can take care of it for you.

If you’re into the do-it-yourself route, you might be a bit averse to having someone else manage such an important role.

But there are several benefits to making this move. They include the following:

You Get Expert Knowledge and Experience

One of the most challenging parts of running a website and having it rank well is not knowing what to do.

Sometimes, it’s not actually writing content or managing the site that takes up a great deal of time – it’s the research, trial, and error.

By outsourcing to an SEO company, you can skip that part. These companies spend their time and energy learning and mastering the art of ranking.

You can take advantage of that knowledge and those skills.

You Get to Save Time for Other Important Tasks

That long to-do list you haven’t probably isn’t going anywhere any time soon, so it’s important that you find ways to save time.

Allowing an SEO company to help with several of your important tasks gives you the opportunity of focusing your time, energy, and creativity on other priorities.

You’ll Likely Find That You Make More Money

If your website isn’t ranking well, it can significantly impact the amount of money your company makes.

That’s not going to change until you’re able to focus on your website rankings.

And with a full to-do list, that might take much longer than you would like.

However, by outsourcing to an SEO company, you have people working on your website.

This is something that can help you see your profits soar much more quickly.

You Can Learn As You Go

As you get an SEO company to help you out, you can pay attention to what they are doing with your content and entire website.

Once you get an idea of what helps your website, you can decide if you want to take over management of it.

You can also let them continue to work, but if you like doing things yourself, this is a great way to learn what to do.

These Companies Meet You Where You Are

It doesn’t matter if you’re just starting out or if you’ve already built your website, SEO companies can help.

They can work on your website from the beginning and put everything in order before you even launch it.

If you’ve already filled your website with content and it’s just not performing well enough, they can help you there, too.

They can dive into your existing content and features to determine what should be improved.

And, they can then make the necessary improvements, and get your website ranking well.

5 Tips to Level-Up Your Ecommerce Supply Chain Management

Ecommerce is a highly competitive sector, often with tight profit margins. Even small differences between companies and their ecommerce supply chain management can have big effects on profitability.

Online retailers are competing based on price, fulfillment standards, delivery times, returns policies, stock levels, and more, all of which can stand or fall based on the effectiveness of your supply chain management strategy.

Sadly, supply chain management isn’t simple. It incorporates a number of different components, including:

identifying the right suppliers for procurement
negotiating price and purchase volumes
logistics and transportation of products between manufacturers, suppliers, and distribution centers
warehouse and inventory management
last-mile order fulfillment and delivery to the end buyer
returns management

The last few years only added to the complexities of supply chain management, with many supply chains still suffering aftershocks from the upheaval of COVID-19.

For example, China recently put much of the country into lockdown again, so just looking at the map of containers off the coast of China waiting to dock and reload is enough to bring any ecommerce owner to tear their hair out.

The good news is that the right supply chain management practices can bring sanity to your supply chain. It makes a difference to begin on the right foot.

So here are 5 supply chain management tips for new business owners getting started in the ecommerce space, to help keep your supply chain coherent and under control.

1. Connect the Whole Supply Chain

Supply chain management can only succeed when it’s end-to-end, which means ensuring visibility into supply chain logistics both upstream (towards the supplier) as well as downstream (towards the end customer).

Successful ecommerce businesses set up processes for tracing every step of the supply chain, linking procurement, inventory management, and supplier vetting with monitoring conditions of products in transit, storage, and last-mile delivery.

For example, this could include using GPS monitoring to see when your shipment leaves the supplier. It might also encompass condition monitoring tags for tracking temperature and humidity within a warehouse or for tracking shocks and tilts whenever fragile items are handled.

Fortunately, there are plenty of supply chain management technologies available today that allow small businesses to begin with low-cost plans and scale up as their business needs grow.

2. Maximize Warehouse Utilization

Warehouse space is at a premium today, with lease prices rising 25% over the past five years and some retailers struggling even to find warehouses where they need them. With this in mind, more efficient warehouse storage could save you a lot of money and frustration.

If you can store more for the same costs, you’ll be able to reduce the frequency of orders, increase your flexibility regarding warehouse location, and lower your vulnerability to supply chain upsets.

Warehouse management tactics go hand in hand with reliable inventory management and demand forecasting, since you have to pay for everything you store, even if it’s not selling well.

Automated inventory management solutions ensure that you always know when high-demand items are running low, while improved data about consumer preferences and market trends help guide you away from products that could sit on your shelves for months.

3. Flex Your Data Capabilities

As you can see already, data is the foundation for every piece in the supply chain management puzzle. If your data sources are fractured, data updates are delayed, and data entries are inaccurate, you’re basically flying blind in a sky full of obstacles.

It’s vital to invest in automated data integration tools that collect data from all the relevant sources and feed it all into a single data repository, creating a single source of truth that’s constantly updated without requiring tedious, time-consuming, and error-prone manual data entry or data transfer.

Among other things, up-to-date, accurate data enable you to choose the most reliable suppliers; negotiate pricing with logistics and carrier companies; select the right products; identify the best locations for your distribution centers and warehouses; and speed up returns processes.

4. Open up Access to Data Insights

There’s one caveat to the importance of data for effective supply chain management, and that’s the importance of avoiding getting washed away in the flood of figures. Data is only useful if it helps you make better supply chain decisions; otherwise it’s just a waste of space.

That’s why you need intuitive business intelligence dashboards that are designed specifically for supply chain management. The right tools offer plenty of visualizations and graphs that assist you in tracking trends and spotting significant changes at a glance.

You want to be able to zoom in to view specific issues on a granular level, and also pull back to take a high-level overview of your entire supply chain. Whichever solutions you choose, make sure they are easy for non-techies to use.

You might not have the time or money for a data science team, plus you want everyone involved to be able to run their own queries and check up on burning supply chain issues independently – otherwise you’ll always be on the back foot when a crisis appears.

5. Ramp up Communication

Communication issues are the number one cause of breakdowns in relationships, and that includes relationships with your suppliers, logistics providers, and fulfillment teams.

Don’t lose sight of the human in the picture; a little appreciation can go a long way to grease the wheels of commerce. The more you communicate, the better everyone will understand what you want from them and why it matters.

For example, suppliers stand at the top of your supply chain. Keep in touch about your needs, the market trends that each of you is seeing, feedback about product quality, logistics, and storage issues, and more.

If something is urgent, let them know, and likewise when you can wait a little for items so they can prioritize other, more urgent, orders.

Ecommerce Supply Chain Management as a Keystone of Success

Many factors go into building a successful ecommerce business, but supply chain management could be the keystone that holds them all up.

Although it’s challenging, end-to-end supply chain visibility, integrated and automated data processes, and improved communication, analytics tools, and warehouse utilization management all help to set your ecommerce business up for success.

Using LinkedIn for Contact Management

Click this image for How to Leverage and Optimize LinkedIn

This is a guest post by Sidney Angelos.

Small to medium sized businesses and larger companies usually invest capital in some sort of customer relationship solution. It is important the information relating to the client is well organized and easy to access. Likewise, individuals (and many smaller businesses) also employ contact management at some level of sophistication. Challenges arise for some when time or money are invested in developing contacts via any of the wide variety of social media communities.

Here’s a quick look at the scenario:

Sign up for account at the likes of Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc.
Agree to have the social site automatically search for friends, followers, or network members.
Perform searches for new contacts and add them to the existing, growing list of existing contacts.
Spend hours, days, and months actively recruiting new contacts.
Decide it makes business (or personal) sense to use that newly acquired contact data for some sales or marketing purposes.
Discover all the time, effort and energy devoted to contact aggregation for many of the social communities has been for naught since many of the terms of service prohibit members from harvesting contact information.
Wonder what the heck to do now!

In reality, the next step, should have been the first one taken. Consider focusing all of ones time and efforts in the area of contact management with the social community found at LinkedIn.
Continue reading Using LinkedIn for Contact Management

Proper Ways Your Business Can Use Social Media Channels

This is a guest post by Steve Lazuka of Interact Media, a company that provides website content development services.

There’s always something new and different in the world of the Internet. Whether it’s the type of programming language your developers are using to create your online presence, or the explosion of social networking sites, you need to keep up with the latest and greatest if you hope to remain competitive in your niche market. If you fail to understand how to properly employ technology and networking tools, the damage to your business can be irreparable.

One of the latest online phenomenon is known as social media marketing. A number of website communities have developed applications that allow their members to communicate with each other as well as the outside world. In essence, these communities are creating social interactions in the digital space. Continue reading Proper Ways Your Business Can Use Social Media Channels

Business Blogging – Benefits, Best Practices, and Blog Topics

This is a guest post by Kristi Hines, social media and blogging enthusiast, on the benefits of business blogging, best practices when starting out a business blog, and ways to find topic ideas for your industry with some examples.

When I first began blogging almost ten years ago, blogs were used almost solely for personal diaries and online journals meant to be shared with only friends and family, or kept private. Within the first two years, however, blogging as a source of income started to rear its head with affiliate programs being pitched to the most known personal blogs. Fast forward to today, and blogs are not only used for individual gain but also for businesses.

Benefits of Blogging for Business

Business and corporate blogs can be valuable assets to a company’s website, creating a strong platform for their content marketing. They can help a business:

Build their brand identity and positively manage their online reputation by putting positive content linked to their name out on the web.
Help them go beyond simply offering products or services to gaining credibility by becoming experts in their industry.
Allow them to build a stronger relationship and community with their customers, potential clients, and even others in their industry through blog comments and social sharing of new information.
Give their site fresh new content, inviting visitors and search engines to return to their site again and again, boosting overall traffic.
Get them ranked for long tail keyword search terms and phrases.

These are the main benefits of business blogging. Now, let’s look at how to make a business blog successful.

Questions to Ask When Getting Started

Probably the most important benefit is, if a business blog is done right, blog posts can lead to conversions and sales. What are the main things to keep in mind when starting or maintaining a business blog?

Who is Your Audience?

B2B businesses will want to write posts targeted towards businesses who are in need of their products and services, whereas B2C businesses will want to write posts geared toward their targeted customer demographic.

When corporate bloggers are coming up with post ideas, it is essential to put themselves in their targeted reader’s shoes and ask themselves:

What would I want to learn about this business and industry?
What hook would make me want to subscribe?
What topic would make me want to comment?
What kind of post wold make me want to inquire about products or services from this company?

Asking yourself these questions will help you determine just the kind of writing that you need to do to get a good response from your future blog community.

What Do My Competitors Do?

Business bloggers should do a bit of competitor research (just like you would do for link building) for similar businesses that also have a corporate blog, and look at how well it goes over with their audience.

Do they get a lot of comments?
Do the posts do well in search?
Do the posts get a lot of social shares? A quick way to check is by installing the Topsy bookmarklet or Delicious Bookmark history bookmarklet (all the way at the bottom of the page) to your browser and seeing how many tweets and bookmarks the posts’ acquire.
What elements of the posts and blog do I like? What elements do I dislike?

This kind of “competitor research” will help you more easily determine what results you want to get from your blog as well as what will help you get your results.

Blogging Best Practices

Whether you are blogging for personal or business purposes, there are some basic best blogging practices that you should always keep in mind.

Make each post easy to share and more socialble by using social sharing buttons and comment plugins to encourage more interaction.
Write like you are talking to your audience – business blogging should be professional, but is also less formal than press releases and article marketing.
Don’t think of your blog (or social networking) as just an advertising platform. Blog readers like information, how-to’s, and, once you have built their trust, occasional recommedations. If they feel like they’re being pushed to buy something in every post, they will likely not come around again.
Link out to other sites that are informational as well. Remember your goal is to create a valuable resources for your readers. Seeing you share quality information will make them trust you even more.

Business Blog Topics

Probably one of the biggest hold-ups in a business creating a blog is what to write about, especially if the business is in a very tight niche.

Finding Inspiration

If you have answered the above “Who is Your Audience?” questions, then you will have a general idea of what topics will interest your potential readers. Other ways to generate ideas include:

Using Twitter and HootSuite (or other Twitter management tools) for monitoring influential twitterers in your industry and what is being discussed by the general public about it.
Does your business have a support department or help desk? What questions are commonly asked by your clients or potential customers? These might be good topics to answer on your blog.
Cover your views on current events and other hot topics in your industry by following major blogs on specific niches using major news networks and sites like Alltop, Technorati, or PostRank.

You might think that some subjects have been covered over and over again and can be found pretty much all over the internet, but what you want to realize is that, when someone is on your site, you want them to be able to find as much useful information possible about your industry on your site without having to go elsewhere (and possibly end up on a competitor’s blog instead).

Specific Examples

Using some of the sponsors of the recent blogging contest by Famous Bloggers (another great resource on how to blog) and The ComLuv Network (home of one of the most comment generating plugins for WordPress), we’ll look at some businesses that do not yet have blogs, and some topics they could be talking about.

Claims.com

Claims.com, the accidents at work specialists, handles personal injury, traffic accidents, and work-related injury claims. There are ton of great topic ideas I can see just from perusing a few pages into their website, including:

Top 5 Most Common Workplace Accidents – What they are, and how much they generally cost if you are not insured.
What is Sofa Rash? – What is it, how can it develop, and what you can do to prevent it.
Whiplash – Where Can it Happen – Whiplash does not just happen when you are in a car wreck. Find out common ways someone can get whiplash, what the symptoms are, and what kind of treatment will be necessary to correct it.

Local Proud

Local Proud is a discount card program that helps you start your own business that will not only help vitalize the local economy, but also promotes going green (and can lead to additional promotional items for local search engine marketing). Some great blog posts for this site include:

Why Go Local? – A look at the struggles of local businesses, and why it is more important than ever to support small businesses in your community.
How Does Local Proud Help the Environment? – Describe how this program helps a community be more green by keeping things closer to home and not requiring printed out coupons. (Great link bait to possibly get on environmental blogs.)
Case Studies – Go beyond a short testimonial and get a business owner to describe their experience with this kind of business, as well as how it has helped them boost local businesses and help the environment.

Online Recruiters Directory

The Online Recruiters Directory is an executive search firm that allows job seekers to connect with those seeking executive talent. This site actually has a small database of articles for jobseekers that could easily be turned into a blog for more interaction and traffic. Some other topic ideas include…

What Do You Need to Get a 100k Job? – A look at the top earners in the most popular 100k+ careers and what they have in terms of college education, certifications, and experience.
Top 100k Jobs for 2010 – A list of the most popular 100k jobs available this year.
You’re Hired – Now What? – What to expect on your first days at a new job for career changers, from those who have transitioned from one field to another. (Could be a great interview series for those who successfully found a job through this service.)

ANS Gear

ANS Gear carries a huge line of paintball guns & gear at discounted prices. Coming from the perspective of someone who has never been involved in paintball, but has heard some very interesting stories, a few topics that would get me interested include:

Paintball 101 – What essential equipment do you need to get started.
Best Places to Compete – What are the top rated places to play in major metropolitan areas.
Top 5 Common Paintball Injuries – What they are, how to avoid them (ie. protective gear), and if avoidance isn’t possible, how to treat them.

Now Relevant

NowRelevant.com is the best new search engine, an alternative to the major search engines for finding relevant niche information. Some interesting things to know about this search engine would be:

What Makes Now Relevant Different? – Expand upon the information in the about us page and show some examples of search results for Now Relevant compared to the other major engines.
PPC 101 – How does it work, and why advertisers should choose Now Relevant’s pay per click program over Adwords or others.
Comprehensive Guide to Using Now Relevant – Cover everything from advanced search operators to where Now Relevant pulls its information from (blogs, social networks, etc.).

Your Thoughts on Business Blogging

Do you have a favorite business blog that others should follow the example of? What are your likes and dislikes about corporate blogs? If you have a business and have a blog, what positive results have you seen? If you are a business that doesn’t have a blog, what is stopping you?

Kristi is the author of Kikolani, a blog which provides blogging tips for successful personal and business bloggers alike, and an Internet Marketing Specialist providing link building services.

This post supports the some of the sponsors of the Famous Bloggers and ComLuv blogging contest. Please visit Kristi’s entry for powerful tips on how to promote your articles for more traffic, link value, and earnings.