We get asked all the time for help with improving the quality of our clients’ Facebook Live videos and we’ve put together the video below as well as an equipment list to get started. This will cost you a few hundred dollars at Amazon but will vastly improve the quality of your videos.
Equipment List:
Add these items to your car and you’ll be on your way to much better Facebook live videos!
Have you ever thought about advertising on YouTube? No? Well, why not? After Google, it’s the internet’s second biggest search platform, and the demand for video content just keeps growing. In fact, it’s estimated that by 2021 about 80 percent of all traffic on the internet will be related to video.
Yes, seriously. So what are you waiting for? When it comes to online marketing, YouTube is something you just have to consider.
Don’t be intimidated! Yes, YouTube is a video channel. But you don’t necessarily have to produce slick videos to advertise there. You CAN, sure. But it’s just not something that’s required. In fact, YouTube offers six different types of ads:
Video ads do get the most engagement, but if you don’t have the budget or desire to create videos, it can still generate traffic to your website.
Take the display ad format, for example. These ads show above the suggested videos and are managed within the Google AdWords format. That’s right – Google owns YouTube. With YouTube, you can leverage the power of Google’s display network and greatly increase your reach.
Plus, recent changes to the AdWords platform mean you can find potential customers who recently looked for your company or related products or services on Google. These “custom intent audiences” leverage YouTube’s video power to close the sale.
Google, with YouTube, is among the leaders in online marketing platforms. At The Get Smart Group, we work with our clients to put together a customized online marketing plan that makes sense for their industry, their business, and their region – so they can effectively and efficiently reach their customers. That means analyzing all the options at our disposal and putting them to work – for you.
The world wide web is a pretty turbulent ocean. And, sometimes, it can be difficult to find your way. There are things that can help, sure, but one of the best tools for cutting through the waves today is remarketing. It makes sure people don’t forget you once they’ve used your website or your mobile app. If they visit and don’t buy anything, remarketing can show potential customers ads related to products they looked at as they travel around more than 2 billion websites on their different devices.
See? Powerful.
Remarketing keeps your brand top-of-mind for customers who aren’t quite ready to make a purchase and increases your brand exposure to your target audience. It has higher conversion and click-through rates than typical display ads.
See? Powerful.
You can even create specific remarketing lists to hyper-target your audiences. Remarket broadly to site visitors, but differently to site visitors who created a shopping cart, but then abandoned it. Create yet another remarketing target for previous customers, to turn them into repeat customers.
See? Powerful.
Here’s the thing, though. A lot of marketing partners will want to upcharge to manage remarketing efforts for you. At The Get Smart Group, we don’t believe in that. We believe remarketing is so important – so powerful – that we don’t want you to be without it. So, we build it in as a crucial piece of your online marketing plan.
Are you ready to take the plunge into online marketing? Don’t just dip a toe in – you’ll be disappointed with the results. If you really want to market your business online, you need to do it the right way. And that means including your remarketing audience in your online marketing mix. But you’ll need someone to see you through – the waters can get a little choppy. That’s where we come in. The Get Smart Group: Your trusty online lifeguards.
Sure. That’s fair enough. Hey – it’s catchy. But when it comes to marketing, there’s an altogether different type of cadence, and it’s one you need to learn because it’s crucial to the marketing success of your business.
In its simplest form, cadence is consistency. But don’t make the mistake of thinking that means being repetitive. Consider for a moment your personal experiences online, and the brands you follow. Are there any that seem to post the same or very similar messages over and over and over again? It’s annoying, right? If someone walked up to you in real life and repeated the same phrase to you every time you met, never saying anything different, you’d think something was wrong. Right?
Marketing cadence applies to everything you do – email marketing, blogging, social and more. It’s the PACE you define for your communications. The flow of your marketing – how often you do it, the timing between a given type of communication, the content it includes and the audience it’s directed to.
Cadence is strategy. It involves knowing when your customers are online. What they’re engaging with, and more. Simply identifying a plan and automating it isn’t quite enough. Automation is helpful, yes. It can remove an incredible burden from your shoulders. But you have to make sure you’re automating the right messages, at the right times, to the right people. THAT is cadence.
No, it isn’t always easy to figure it out. But that’s OK. You can get seasoned pros like us on your team who fully understand the concept, how to measure it and how to adjust it if necessary to make sure your marketing plan hits your targets.
After all, isn’t that the entire point?
As a small business owner today, you know how important it is to manage your online presence. You likely also know just how difficult it can be. With so many different platforms out there and so little time, getting a handle on your locations, hours, reviews and more can become overwhelming.
But there’s a handy little tool that can help you gain a solid grip on most of it: Google My Business.
With a Google My Business account, you can connect your Google Maps, Search, Reviews, Insights, Google + listing, and Analytics, significantly decreasing the amount of time you’d spend trying to manage these platforms independently and increasing the correct, properly managed information about your business available online.
It’s pretty easy to get started, and having a Google My Business account will help make sure your customers are able to find you. That mysterious Google algorithm gives a boost in search rankings to businesses that are optimizing it.
Just go to google.com/business to begin. Click “Start Now.” Sign in with your existing Google account, or create a new one.
Follow the Google My Business platform steps to find your business. You can search by the name or address. My Business will show you a map with a pin based on your address. Drag and zoom the map and position the pin to the exact location of your business. Choose your business category, phone number and website.
Google will then confirm that you’re authorized to manage the business – verification occurs with a snail mail postcard or an automated phone call. When you receive the verification code, you’ll need to enter it into the platform. Once your listing is verified, you can add and publish photos of your business, your business hours, contact information and more.
It may sound like a lot, but Google makes it really easy to use. And if you’d like a little help you can always turn to professionals like The Get Smart Group for a little helping hand.
Think about all the things you do differently today than just a few years ago:
The point being, even if you aren’t using all of these things – they’re all possible. Technology is rapidly changing the way we live – and it’s changing the way we run our businesses, too. It’s helping us be more efficient while meeting our customer’s needs – especially machine learning.
Machine learning is really just a new way of tackling old problems, by teaching computers to learn on their own to solve problems. In marketing, we leverage machine learning to automatically update keywords to match new website content, for example. It frees up your time while helping ensure you don’t miss any important opportunities.
Machine learning is also crucial to efficient online ad buying. Manually adjusting bids can really eat up a lot of time – time that’s better spent on activities that are more important to your business. New tools allow us to set bids for each individual auction, bidding millions of times a day so we can get the ad placements that are within budget and make the most sense for your business. No human could ever achieve that.
It’s all really just a high-tech way of helping you make smart business decisions based on data. But if it sounds overwhelming, don’t worry. You have a friend in the business who gets it, and who’d be more than happy to give you a hand. Contact us today!
For businesses, do-it-yourself online reputation management is like herding cats. No matter what you try to do, your reputation seems to be running in ten thousand different directions. A yellow one runs left and just when you grab it, a calico one darts between your legs. Turn around to chase it, and the rest of the group takes off.
Before you know it, you’re all tied up in knots, and your online reputation is a mess. To add to the frustration, your competitors don’t seem to be facing the same problem. When you look them up online, all their reputation “cats” seem to be marching in a nice, orderly row.
So. What gives?
Well, it sounds like your competition has discovered the important trick of working with a pro. Someone who understands the ins-and-outs of getting those cats to march in a line, and has the tools to do it. Luckily, now you can, too!
At The Get Smart Group, we can help you deploy our proven system to manage your online reputation, and boost your SEO in the process. Sounds like a pretty good deal, right?
Customer reviews – the drivers of your online reputation – weigh heavily on consumer buying decisions. In fact, just one negative review can make up to 22 percent of potential buyers reconsider buying from YOU. Increase that to three negative reviews, and you’ve lost about 59 percent of your potential customers. Pile on more bad reviews and your pool of potential customers continues to shrink.
Once those bad reviews exist, there isn’t a lot you can do about them. It’s unlikely they’ll go away. If you can, you should reach out publicly (and professionally!) to the customer who left it and try to resolve the issue. But the absolute best course of action is to provide excellent customer service and get those customers to leave positive reviews. That’s what our system helps you do. Ask for reviews. Manage potentially negative reviews with service recovery. And put your business at the top of the reputation management mountain.
Yes, it’s a tall mountain. But The Get Smart Group can help you get to the top – with all of your cats.
-Order a pizza – and have it delivered.
-Wash your dog.
-Make a 30 minute meal.
-Clean the bathroom.
-Go for a walk.
-Change your business.
It’s true. That’s what our free 30-minute marketing consultation can do. We know you’re busy. And we know that, as a business owner, every 30-minute block in your day is incredibly valuable. That’s why we’ve designed these half-hour conversations to quickly drill down into your current marketing efforts, so that you’ll walk away with great recommendations, free of charge.
It seems almost silly, right? That in the same amount of time it takes to have a piping hot pie brought to your door, you can have a conversation that could help you grow your business?
Sounds silly. But it’s not. We’re totally serious.
When we talk, we’ll cover a lot of ground:
That’s a lot, right? But we’re not done. We’re going to squeeze all we can out of this 30 minutes.
After all, we aren’t just on this call so we can learn about you. We’re on this call so you can learn FROM us. So now that we understand you and your business situation a little better, you can expect us to share:
If you ask us, that’s a pretty good return on your 30-minute investment.
If you’re ready to jump-start your business in the time it takes to scrub the tub, schedule your free consultation today. There’s really no reason to wait!
Have you ever considered how your ad color/branding color choices affect lead capture for better or for worse?
At The Get Smart Group, we consider color choices very carefully. Certain colors can stimulate certain emotions. One can use specific colors to target particular demographics, increasing engagement and sales amongst those in that targeted buyer segment.
This topic is a reminder of one of the most famous (or infamous) examples of the consequence of color in marketing:
Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud’s nephew and legendary (or notorious) public relations pioneer (or propagandist) saved/made unknown amounts of money for Lucky Strike Cigarettes back in the 1930’s by convincing American women through various publicity stunts (anonymously funded by Lucky Strike) that smoking was hip for ladies and that a certain shade of green was fashionable and hip at a time when said shade of green had been thought of as just the opposite.
Bernays, with the help of his friends in high places, endeavored to create the positive buzz surrounding that certain shade of green because it was the brand’s color and money had already been spent on packaging in that color. To discard the packaging would have been to discard the money paid for that packaging.
Ed’s understanding of “crowd psychology” and his efforts in that Lucky campaign started a green fad and a smoking trend among women of the era, nationally and perhaps even beyond – all in the name of saving money/making money for his employer.
Our suggestion is not that one needs to generate buzz around unpopular colors or fabricate social trends out of thin air, the point is simply to take heed of the power of color and social trends in regards to any contemporary marketing strategy.
Another example:
Do you think that a certain (115 year old) American motorcycle company would enjoy the success that it does today if instead of capitalizing on an assumed outlaw image, said company changed its colors, logo, and promotional materials in such a way that contravened the desperado image and departed from the brand’s celebrated history? You get the point…
So consider your own brand, your own history, your own customers – and your desired customers and their values. As younger generations grow into adults, professionals, and homeowners, you need to find ways to reach them whilst staying true to your company’s history, values, and niche.
It can be a delicate balance, but with solid branding and the right marketing (ever important color selection falls under both of these umbrellas) your business could someday celebrate a centennial.
Call The Get Smart Group for a FREE 30 minute marketing consultation. We want to help you forge your identity.
Peaceful mountain streams.
Peaceful snowfalls.
Peaceful walks through the park.
Some peaceful things like these are relatively easy to find.
While others, well, they can remain more elusive:
Peaceful night’s dinner out with a toddler.
Peaceful grocery shopping with a toddler.
Peace of mind.
That last one may be the most elusive of all. And yet, the one we look the hardest for. So how in the world do you find it, especially as a business owner when you’re working so hard every day to keep your business running, and spending hours on tasks that may not be the things you’re best at?
It’s pretty simple: You hire the experts at The Get Smart Group to handle that stuff for you.
Facebook and Google advertising not really your cup of tea? No problem! We handle this for our clients everyday, helping them achieve success and meet their sales goals.
Don’t consider yourself a marketing guru? We have you covered! From graphic design and social media planning to web content creation, radio and video project management, even corporate communications consultation and more, The Get Smart Group has the resources and expertise you can depend on.
Tired of trying to chase your online reputation and boost your SEO? Let us do it for you! We consistently employ a variety of tactics for our clients to help them obtain the results they’re looking for.
Need a robust CRM to track your marketing campaigns and leads, get insights into your web traffic and generate customizable sales reports? How about one that integrates with your merchant account to help you manage online store purchases? Yeah, we do that, too.
Think of us like the peace of mind fairies, waving our magic wand, solving your marketing problems and – yes – giving you that elusive peace of mind.
Just … don’t look to us if you also have a toddler in the house. You’re on your own with that, mate.
