#TOFU HOW CAN YOU CREATE SO MANY AWESOME DESIGNS

[nervouseagledreamland]

RESCUING B2B CONTENT MARKETING STRATEGY

A strong content marketing strategy acts as a backbone for the business to grow. There are very few companies who don’t realise the importance of a strong and efficient content marketing strategy. Many marketers and executives have accepted this tactic to survive and compete in today’s marketplace to reach and build relationships with potential clients.

The biggest question that lingers around the minds of B2B companies is “ How to produce quality content that helps increase traffic and ROI?”

Thus, we have entered the world where a competition thrives between designers, writers and managers who have the opportunity to develop their skills and live in the corporate world of race.

What makes a B2B Content Marketing strategy?

A B2B Content must not fail to inspire the urge to reciprocate so that the audience thinks of you first when they think of growing their business over your competitors. Your content strategy is very important for you to gain affordable organic leads and stand out from the crowd.

B2B content requires more complex planning and joining the dots and many decision making processes for building trust and connecting with the audiences

While planning a B2B content for your business, make sure you keep in mind the following:

Align with stakeholders.

Gaining internal and external followers interested in new marketing.

Manage skills and talents on your team.

Build compelling Business cases.

Why does your B2B Content marketing strategy need to be rescued?

Content failure sometimes comes up because of misalignment and absence of the materials in your content that the audience came looking for.

It is at this time, your content needs a lifeboat to prevent sinking. One needs a plan of action now and be focussed on daily workflow.

Here is what to do:

Respect the Value exchange:

The content and the value needs to build sufficient trust and credibility amidst the audience and ultimately lead you up in their perspective. This will also improve the chances for exchanges.

How about introducing a customer feedback loop?

Deliberate with your sales team and jot down the common queries and responses from your customers. Find the most effective ones and use them in facebook and other social networking sites , content topic ideations and CTAs.

Secondly, listening is an art, so use the skill of SOCIAL LISTENING. Observe and make a note of their opinion about your brand on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Quora. What is the buzz brewing around your brand? Is there any specific question that needs to be answered instantly or a rumour or doubt that needs to be quickly resolved? Find and address them at the nick of time, before they spread like forest fire and grow into crisis.

Try tackling difficult topics

Always consider offering a different point of view. Look beyond educating and making the audience aware and show them what the future of their brand looks like, the idea of including the audiences in the success scenario.

Existing blogs might cover the basic topics, but a new perspective is what your niche seems to need to grow. So, dive deep into research and find out how to solve some of the specific problems.

Improve your Keyword Research.

Always try to target keywords based on the data, instead of choosing them as per search volume. Very often we come across personas and verticals where the REAL keywords are missing. This hits hard on your results as most of these pages do not receive the organic traffic even though being an awesome article.

When you are trying to make your article to fit the audience’s needs, you have two choices to make. Must you focus on creating new content or optimize the old existing ones?

The answer is simple! When you already have some quality content, start by optimising them, after being done with it, continue with creating new content. Further, go for deep keyword research and look for opportunities in each of your top blogs to rank them better.

Once you fulfil these, your content is ready for your audience, and it ought be as they wish! Therefore, now you can step forward to save your B2B context strategy.

What follows Next?

Now you have to expand the depth of your content to give out an elaborate description of the topics. Make sure that:

One should maintain an ample word count for their content to compete with the already ranking pages. This does not mean to overcrowd your content, to make it look messy. The content must cover additional sub topics with detailed information that other pages don’t give.

It is observed that the businesses which post or blog 11+ times welcome more organic traffic than those which post 2-3times per month.

Don’t go for longer-tailed keywords, since they narrow your niche. Opt for short-tailed keywords instead. After gaining audiences’ attention, level yourself up with higher volume keywords, to leave a mark.

Finally……

Two more milestones to cross, and your content marketing strategy is ready to fly high.

Plan your content for each stage of the funnel- TOFU( Top Of The Funnel) to be organised to bring in more traffic and increase brand awareness. MOFU( Middle of the Funnel) to offer help and guidance to those who need their doubts and queries to be answered to make them trust your expertise and authenticity. BOFU(Bottom of the funnel) meets the audience at the exit point of your page when he/she is on the decision to make the purchase. BOFU ensures to finalise the deal and win the trust of the customer, as why choose you over the others in the market?

Relevant CALL TO ACTION are the final arrows here. You should carefully place your CTAs on your content, so that it is more approachable to the audiences. Don’t always place it at the end of the content, if you want your audience to access them. Make sure to use appropriate and proper terms to evoke the urgency in them to choose you.

Your traffic will surely rise if you follow these strategies to rescue your drowning ship of your B2B content marketing.

[twistednuns]

December 2018

Iglo Veggie love with broccoli, buckwheat and black beans. Quick and easy.

The TEDxTUM event was pretty inspiring. I loved how they organised it and some of the speakers were amazing. Seeing all the cool stuff other people are working on actually motivated me to try and achieve great things myself. I'd like to learn about something new, start a project or volunteer.

Pick Up Limes videos.

The way Cher sings the word Memphis in her cover song.

Seeing Frank for the first time in four months. Having a good time at the Uncle Acid concert, getting a beer at Flex. Even though meeting him always causes some kind of emotional turmoil it might actually help to solve a few things I've been stressing over this time, for example that whole deal with Claudia.

Spending two hours in the kitchen on a Sunday morning. Preparing a summer and a winter curry. Pre-cutting salad. Listening to Tai Chi music. Baking these divine buckwheat chocolate cookies - absolutely delicious even though I forgot to add salt. Kinda healthy, too! It's grain-free (I even used groats) and I substituted part of the sugar with honey.

Gift ideas for rock collectors and mycophiles.

A spotted woodpecker in our backyard.

Dalmatian Jasper. Such a pretty stone.

Blinded by the Light. And a trip down musical memory lane. Making a nostalgia mixtape. Singing, enjoying the sound of my voice (as long as I hit the right vocal range).

Drawing owls. For hours. Using my Polychromos coloured pencils. I'm currerntly working on two owl-related projects, designing a logo for coffee roasters and making my friends' wedding invitation. Drawing owls like lovebirds is such a satisfying thing to do. Also: making my students come up with new ideas! Some actually drew some owl logos, too!

Tetris.

Reading books I don't understand. By people who are smarter than me. A very humbling experience. There is so much more to learn, experience and achieve.

Franzi's elegant coat and her ice crystal earrings. She's pregnant but she is skinnier than before and looks great. We cuddled up on a rooftop and had Kinderpunsch.

Practising The Pogues' Fairytale of New York for for karaoke night. I never hit the NYPD choir note quite right. My neighbours must hate me.

Taking a mental health day. Starting the day with baking cookies, making vegan sushi rolls. Reading, taking a nap. Yoga in the evening. Feeling really happy and relaxed. One of those rare inspired days when everything just falls into place. I kept revisiting beautiful places and memories during Shavasana. And I LOVE my yoga teacher more and more each week. So sad she is leaving the studio.

Taming your temper - tips for anger management.

Another coincidence. I wondered when the next Bilderbuch record will be released when I was looking at Mavi Phoenix at her concert - that girl is the female version of Maurice Ernst. A few hours later I found out that Bilderbuch actually had released a new album one day ago. WHAT.

Mirror tape.

Being a fluffy little red cat's human of choice. We sat in a cat café, no animals in sight. After a while a cat walked up straight towards me, sat down on my yellow scarf and kneaded it. Later she demanded attention and purred while I scratched her jaw. Apparently this was quite a rare occurence because she is said to be really shy and hard to handle. Weirdos unite!

Making Bhindi Masala, a vegan okra curry. Spicy and intense - delicious! Oh, and sushi rolls filled with avocado, veggies and fancy tofu/tempeh. Now I have a whole container waiting for me in the fridge.

Practising yoga for 20min on a gloomy Monday morning. Lighting a candle, drinking a cup of Ayurvedic Kapha tea with honey and lemon.

Tom, who inspired me to learn more about Ayurveda. And to rewatch The Darjeeling Limited because let's face it - Wes Anderson really knows how to make one of the poorest countries in the world look gorgeous.

We become what we think about. It's impossible to be successful without having a destination.

Quotations from Siri Hustvedt's The Blazing World: 1 / 2

"Smelling you almost makes me cum."

Running around with a fake septum piercing. I kinda like the look. I'm actually considering getting a real one but so far I'm fine with the clip-ons. The good thing is that you can't see the ring's ends anyway in that kind of piercing.

Spending time with the old friends. The best ones. The ones you don't have to speak to and it's still not uncomfortable. The ones you can be super weird around and they embrace it. The ones you can tell your strangest ideas and stories.

There is a new Turkish supermarket right around the corner! Fresh cilantro whenever I want! YES!!!

Heavy snowfall. It does look kinda pretty, I admit.

Many questions, not enough answers at the ESO Supernova exhibition/planetarium. / Making another cat friend over breakfast. / Seeing my foxy ginger lady Anika again after such a long time! / Orange marzipan lebkuchen and roasted coconut almonds (they taste like Raffaello). / Finding the perfect earrings and a beautiful head band at EDITED - The Label. / Performing Fairytale of New York live on stage with Manu. Being able to curse at somebody through song is perfect, I had a lot of fun. Also, he promised me his art teacher sweater as a Christmas present.

A knitting project with rainbow wool.

Making a clay sculpture for my mum. Taking it out of the oven at 80 degrees, wrapped in a dish towel like a baby.

The honey marzipan nougat bar from dm bio.

Meeting Manu at his office. Receiving the most awesome paint palette sweater as a Christmas present! And he let me spend a full hour in virtual reality! He has such an amazing programme which lets you draw in 3D and float around in space (with VR goggles). I'm absolutely fascinated and intrigued. Gotta visit him more often.

Meeting Tobi, Maike, Lena and Christian at Märchenbasar. Being drunk after some Feuerzangenbowle with rum (Pfeffi in Manu's case) and white mulled wine. Taking the long way home.

Buying Paulaner Spezi for my class. Supermarket trips with the kids before 8am. Schrottwichteln. Watching random goat videos and intros to children's series.

Having a drink at Goldene Bar in Haus der Kunst. Such a gorgeous place. I'm trying to get into a workshop on the museum's architecture at the end of January.

Making random people want to kiss me. Having no desire whatsoever to actually kiss them.

The Harry Potter round (on special request) at the pub quiz.

Reading Stephen Hawking's short answers to some of the big questions. I have to admit, I know nothing about physics or cosmology and at times his explanations were super hard to understand (fine, I probably didn't understand most of it) but I love creating a need to use my brain in uncommon ways.

Vivid dreams. About  dangerous skyscrapers (just different floors stacked loosely on top of each other), a kidnapping in a futuristic car by very glamorous gangsters, lesbians on a scooter trying to save me, travelling through Asia and the US with Sash, a sinking ship (but all the passengers swam back to the surface after a short period of unconsciousness), ATMs, fancy drinks, meeting strangers with beautiful eyelashes at a restaurant.

Discovering the Trouvelot astronomical drawings (1882) on the darkest day of the year, winter solstice. Watching the night fade away ever so slowly in the morning from the kitchen window, squeezing fresh oranges to make juice for breakfast. Bright orange and midnight blue is a great colour combination.

ASMRctica.

An article about a dear friend of mine appeared in Süddeutsche Zeitung! So happy for him.

Spending time with very old friends right before Christmas. Tobi, Sash, Michi, Yanic, Fischi and his wife... Playing MarioKart on SNES with Peter and taking weird selfies together. I had a very nice evening.

Managing to get a look at downtown Chicago during my layover. I uber-ed into the city centre (watching the skyscrapers getting larger and larger), walked around Millenium Park and along Lake Michigan. I spent quite a bit of time at Blick, an amazing art store, before I took the train back to the airport.

Arriving in Mexico in the middle of the night on Christmas Eve. Seeing the city sparkling from above. Watching a bunch of kids beating a pinata well after midnight. Arriving in a beautiful artist's apartment in Condesa.

The Anthropology Museum in CDMX made it on the list of my favourite museums ever. I could have spent days there. I kept sketching some of the funny masks and Maya figurines. There were plenty of creepy tombs and skeletons, depictions of weird Gods, handicrafts and woodcarvings. It was just so interesting, probably because I had never seen a lot of South American / Aztec culture before and I love learning and exploring new things.

Christmas day in CDMX: sunshine, tacky glitter decorations, pointy balloons and spiky pinatas. Dancing, ancient smoke rituals performed by a Mayan community.

Mexican street food, especially the vegetarian street food tour with David. Meeting the Blue Corn Lady (her quesadillas are with cactus and beans and they're incredibly delicious). Flatbread, corn, fruit with chili and lime. Pulque and Mezcal. Finding out that the green salsa is actually worse than the red one. Tacos, Enchiladas, Tamales. If you go to Mexico just for the food you'll still have plenty to explore.

That evening with the pink sunset. Walking through the old used book store in Roma. Reading an interesting take on Lars von Trier's Melancholia. Meeting the resident cat.

Lucha Libre! Watching the luchadores, especially the small people in the second round. Laughing about the Mexican boy next to me swearing at the top of his lungs. Getting a mask as a souvenir.

Climbing the sun and moon pyramid at Teotihuacán. Getting a sunburn. Enjoying the atmosphere. It's a very impressive site.

Diving in Cozumel with Brooke-Anne (a librarian from Las Vegas who was raised by Mormons), Cynthia from Quebec and Lucie from Toulouse. Entering some coral formations underwater. Eating cantaloupe melon and chocolate cookies after the dive. Spending the evening with another Canadian, Jussi from Finland and that other dude from Puerto Rico. And some Indio beers.

What I loved most about Tulum were the ruins (right next to a gorgeous beach) and the health food restaurants (La Hoja Verde and Co.Conamor).

And this year I don't really have a good New Year's Eve story because I fell asleep at quarter past eleven in a little village west of Tulum. All alone. Could be worse though, I had an amazing year.

[multipleforks]

Remember when going to Miami meant a four-day Charlie Sheen bender in South Beach where you barely knew your name by the time you got on the flight back home? Well, not anymore, (in regard to the South Beach part, the partying is still what Miami is all about)! Miami’s ‘boroughs’ have really taken center stage lately. There’s Brickell, the upscale, fancy, wealthy, business driven section of Miami, with five-star luxury hotels, high-rise office buildings and condos, and super trendy restaurants, which seems to combine ‘NYC’s Meatpacking and the Financial District’; Little Havana, which has tons of amazing hole in the wall Cuban spots, the best ‘Café Con Leche you will ever have’ and has an awesome Latin American sexy vibe to it, sort of like the ‘Flushing, Queens of Miami’; and the Design District, known for its sleek modern architecture, upscale design stores, art galleries, and celebrity restaurants, the ‘Soho of Miami’; and finally Wynwood (my favorite), known for street art, craft breweries and a young, hip crown, which is like a tiny slice of Williamsburg Brooklyn.

Similar to many parts of Brooklyn, Wynwood started as a neglected and decrepit manufacturing district filled with old, abandoned warehouses and dilapidated buildings. It was an area of the city not many people dared to venture out to. Now, old warehouse walls have turned into giant canvases for some of the most talented street and graffiti artists from around the world and streets are often jam packed with tourists. And who can blame them? There is a bar, restaurant, art gallery, boutique clothing store, brewery and trendy coffee shop on every corner. If that isn’t enough, check out Wynwood Yards where they have live music onstage, food trucks and a really cool indoor/outdoor bar. If you are however, looking for suggestions for things to do (and if you love food and culture), definitely check out Miami Culinary Tours. (They currently do tours in all areas of Miami including: Little Havana, South Beach, Wynwood, Design District, Miami City, and Coconut Grove). The Wynwood tour costs $69 (+ tax), takes about 2.5 hours, and includes a wonderful tour guide (Gina is absolutely incredible), lots of food and dessert, and a tour of the murals in Wynwood Yards.

Tours run on Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday for Wynwood. The Saturday Wynwood lunch tour started at 12pm and met outside of Wynwood Walls. Sadly, it was a rainy Saturday, but that didn’t stop us! Our tour guide had us congregate inside the Wynwood museum where our tour guide, Gina, started by introducing herself, asking us about ourselves, then about began the discussion about Tony Goldman’s influence on Wynwood. Goldman was a real estate developer and art aficionado originally from New York City, who was known for revamping South Beach and Soho in NYC. He is the one attributed to revamping the abandoned warehouses in Wynwood with a vision of turning the area into one giant art canvas, which is pretty much what he did. Wynwood Walls, a giant outdoor canvas for street artists is one of the most incredible outdoor space in the country. Gina took a few minutes to speak in depth about Tony and the start of this beautiful, funky art district section of Miami, and then came the food portion of the tour…and whew, was there food!

Our first food stop on the tour was Wynwood Kitchen and Bar. As soon as you walk inside this restaurant, you will know why they call it ‘one of the coolest and most visually striking restaurants in the nation’. Floor to ceiling murals are painted in the bar area by Shepard Fairey, the artist who created the famous Obama Hope sticker. Additionally, other spectacular canvases in the dining room were created by the Berlin graffiti spray paint artist, German Artist Christian Awe. It’s almost like eating in a giant, high ceiling funky art gallery. Since the restaurant is considered a ‘tapas bar’ we were offered a selection of small bites from their menu which included, delicious fried chicken empanadas, a tequeno (fried breaded cheese stick made with bread dough and queso blanco) and fried sweet plantains with cheese on top. We also got to taste a sample of a blonde beer from a local brewery. Everything was excellent.

After this stop, we popped into the vegan casual eatery Dr Smood a few blocks away. As soon as we walked into this healthy eatery which can only be described as ‘hipster-esque’, ‘super millennial’, and ‘supermodels in brand new Lulelemon athletics eating only all natural, chemical free, vegan food’, Gina said, ‘we’re going to have a vegan, gluten free, avocado panini. Then she paused and said, ‘now, I know what you’re all thinking, how can a vegan, gluten free sandwich be any good? Don’t groan before you try it, I swear it’s actually really tasty’. She was not lying (and her comment was very on point). I personally believe there’s a little bit of Anthony Bourdain inside of all of us meat eaters. It’s that snobby, how could you live off lentils, vegetables, and tofu mentality? (He used to rip apart vegetarians every second he had the chance to, but I digress). Gina said that they use only organic food and create their own ‘performance bread’ using four ingredients: millet flakes, spelt flour, water and salt, which is supposed to give you energy and not spike your blood sugar. The sandwich was incredible, and they were right, I felt great afterwards. No sugar comedown that white bread tends to bring. Another interesting concept they use in this café is their color-coded system for each menu item. Red – power, pink – beauty, yellow – immunity, green – detox, blue – energy, purple – health. You can choose your food or beverage based on how you’re feeling or what you’re looking to obtain from your food. Although they only have locations in NYC and Miami now, their stores are guaranteed to take off in outdoorsy cities like Denver, Austin and Los Angeles (and beyond!)

From there we moved onto the Peruvian restaurant and tapas bar, GK Bistronomie where we had two courses and a glass of pairing wine. The first course consisted of black grouper ceviche with lime, white corn and corn nuts and two small pork rolls (or a bowl of quinoa for those who opted out of the pork rolls – Bourdain is rolling in his grave as we speak). The dish was spectacular, especially the ceviche where the salt and crunchiness from the corn paired so well with the sour from the lime and the juicy flavors of the marinated fish!  The second course was beef anticuchos (or chicken as a substitute) made with potato fries in spicy cheese sauce (huancaina sauce) and a traditional chimichurri sauce with red peppers on top. This dish was complete flavor overload, cheesy, salty, charcoal, meets fried and slightly sweet. We were also offered a glass of red wine, white wine, or beer to pair with this dish.

Knowing that we were all in total food coma mode and needed a bit of a break before dessert, Gina walked us around Wynwood Yards and described many of the artists themselves, their murals, and their sources of inspiration. It was incredibly mesmerizing. It’s crazy to think that the murals are torn down at least once a year, they’re so beautiful! My only complaint about this part of the tour is that we didn’t get quite as much walking in as I would have liked, as gelato came soon after and I really thought I was going to explode! Maybe they should include an optional 10-minute sprint around the parameters of Wynwood portion of the tour!

Anyway, as mentioned above, the final stop of the tour was Flavian Gelateria which offers all-natural artisanal gelato made from local dairy and fresh produce. The inside does in fact resemble a small European boutique ice cream shop with wooden finishing’s and gorgeous white marble counter-tops. The shop was located inside a little vestibule which had indoor couches and benches for seating. Perfect for a rainy or sweltering hot day!

(The homeless guy pictured was clearly not part of this tour!)

Although there were fourteen people on our tour, Gina was excellent at getting everyone together and taking the time to give everyone some needed love and attention. I will definitely check out another one of their tours next time I am in South Florida!

On a final note, if you’re looking for something to do after your food tour, definitely check out some of the awesome breweries they have in the area. Here is TimeOut’s list of best breweries in Wynwood. Veza Sur, their #1 pick was fantastic. Aside from the place being super fun, Latin funky, and perfect for big groups (they have more boardgames than a 1st grade classroom), they also have excellent beers, including their Arroz Con Mango beer which was 10.8% ABV and was fantastic! They also do beer flights, and beer cocktails, and while you’re there, do make sure to have a coffee porter with some real whipped cream. Holy cow is it fantastic! As a cherry on top of the cake, the staff here is super friendly and one of the coolest things about this bar is the fact that they have multiple phone chargers that you can borrow. This is the first time I have ever seen this at a bar. They were actually excited to charge your phone for you. Usually I have to beg a bartender to use an outlet and they get all flustered that I’m wasting their time! I would give this place 5/5 stars just for their portable chargers!

Miami Culinary Tours – A Little Tour of Wynwood Remember when going to Miami meant a four-day Charlie Sheen bender in South Beach where you barely knew your name by the time you got on the flight back home?

[undergroundcreator-blog]

Day 15: at Taoyuan

Todo list: be precise in my writing: show more, don’t tell too much. There needs to be a balance.

I’m now in Taoyuan airport. The resources here are awesome. I do not know who is the director of all these central places in this airport. The design is great. Everything looks so beautiful. It’s so different from 2 years from now. I was here and everything looked so ugly. Now the transformation. Everything changes over time.

I do not know why now I can even write straight like this. Though there is no logical structure, I can write with the flow. Before there was just thoughts and thoughts and I can never escape from these thought patterns I established. I’m not an owner at all, but the mind dictates my writing. Therefore I was needing Trello for this method.

Now I have established the discipline to write, and I no longer need that Trello. It feels increasingly natural for me to write now.

In the morning yesterday, I was imagining a more intimate way to connect with people when saying goodbye. It was just my idea to hold my friends’ hand in the wish of sharing energy. I experimented it with Akasha today and it feels great. I think it’s a great way to say goodbye because sometimes hugging is still not intimate. Holding hands are much more close and I can feel their energy more.

How do I feel coming back to Taiwan again? No feeling, I’m just amazed by its beauty. There is no remembrance. Because this place is so new, and I have none memory here. But I feel happy because I’m going back home after 8 months. It’s great going back and forth over time and not sticking to any one place in particular. Because I just want to explore different things and different experiences. But for me, I have different priorities so right now I cannot just stay here and work for a restaurant. That’s not my priority because my main purpose is to learn to program and experiment with different things to have good technical skills preparing for my Keystone next year.

Reading here at Panasonic library and seeing the lights they design is awesome. It changes the light whenever I feel something and they make it natural and intuitive. I believe’s the progress of technology and I feel grateful for that. Just before I landed here in Taiwan I and Akasha had dinner at the Japanese restaurant and we ate tofu and some tempura. It’s delicious. But the important point is our discussion. She talks about how she thinks about Suzuki and his idea about education people in the natural environment. In the beginning, I thought we have opposite thoughts. And I was so in the mood of arguing and disagreeing all the time. But we don’t take it and none of us becomes so emotional because of this discussion because it’s based based on understanding. Then what happened was we are just different in terms of our priority. I think technology is the short term approach and we need to create good technology appealing to the environment and reduce waste. And I think’s the potential future. Akasha thinks the opposite because she thinks of the long-term: which is to educate a new generation of students and individuals close to nature and they might be friendly to the environment. Yeah, that can happen. We can create that generation, but it will be a lot of years from now to execute it and spread it to reach millions of people. Technology is great because it is sympathetic to humans. It does not blame humans. Instead, technology tries to improve humanity by making green technologies more accessible to people, more reachable, and more friendly to people. That’s the job of designers and creators, and I think it can create a great future where a lot of useless waste will be reduced. Okay, so the detail of the discussion is not my purpose, but it’s from the discussion I found that thought the argument seems different, it’s only the matter of priority. And I feel like there is no one right or wrong in this case. It’s just the diversity that happens and it created a diversity of opinions and we go to different paths because of our different values. And so, no one is right and no one is wrong at all. Once the ideal is imposed, then we danger will become more prominent. That’s what I feel afraid and I don’t want this to happen. Even at the class discussions, I can barely see the resolve and I feel like two half pies have not been united and I cannot see the whole picture. But what should be my attitude? seeking opponents that can challenge my ideas? As Akasha has shown, she felt uncomfortable listening to the debate because it’s against her values. And that’s common to us. But if we do not come out of our comfort zone then we will realize over time we did not change very much. After 4 years, do you feel anything different? Do you feel you have changed at some points? If not, then the education fails you.

I think speeches, at least at a graduation speech. one should talk about something that is provoking and worth thinking about. If they talk about cliche then it’s not worth it.

I might sit here forever provided that this place is a great office place and I can enjoy studying here very much. They also have a library with a lot of books from different languages. This is just like utopia even.

There is an internship position that VP Bank is hiring. But I know it will not be me because I’m not interested in doing these kinds of data analysis that just pull data out and analyze it until it’s clean. I want to have my own problems, not financial data I found no interest it. I can have a good internship position and can potentially become a person at a potential bank with a great salary, but that’s not my point at all. That’s not my purpose. So I will not do that. My point is to do human-centric design. And I feel like it’s a new field. Like a light right here. I can customly choose the light I want to have and it’s based on my mood.

Design just makes everything prettier and more beautiful and it’s the meaning and the purpose of itself. That’s why I love the Taoyuan Airport so much. And I have a special love for Taiwan.

As I reflected more this year, I feel like this year is great. I have a lot of inner challenges, but I also progressed and learned new skills. Compared to the time in Taiwan, I learned the basic stuff and most of the time I spent on eating and playing different random things with no purpose. It seems like wasting time but now I learned that I need a better research skill and it has been important for me.

It’s interesting. My hands look whiter than a few years ago. I remember it used to look like an African, a person said so. My high school friend, Ha Trang, if I remember. There are special occasions just pop up my mind when the triggers come: like this when I remember a moment in high school. Or like when Akasha remember I mentioned to her the term GTS: sounds professional, but it means Google that Shit. It’s funny and that’s why people remember it. I should create or search for more memes on the internet or from people, I guess?

And when at Starbucks, Akasha said she could not write diary because she could not think of anything to write. It’s funny. I have found so many things to write and I don’t even have enough time to write it all. Traveling time has always been great moments for me. Because it’s time to reflect on the last journey. I wrote it somewhere but I think I have forgotten it somewhere that I do not even remember where did I write it. I hope it’s still on some apps like Note, or OneDay. But I guess I might have lost it. That’s a pity, for the sake of writing just for itself, then when I’m done writing this I could save nothing and it’s lost. I’m a painful experience.

Yeah, but maybe she has not recognized that there are so many ideas to write about. If she could find nothing to write, she could use a prompt. But she said writing in class has been enough for her. No, in-class writing does not count at all. One way to relive today or any other days is to write. Like Tarkovsky, like a lot of great intellectuals have tried to write their diaries every day. It sounds trivial, but I think it’s one of the most worthy of mediums that one can explore others’ minds.

I have realized that to be a person who is mature is a person who has disciplines. I mean, not external disciplines like a robot in the military, but an inner moral person who is not curious about other people’s lives and respect their privacy I think is one criterion that needs to be established. One likes to talk about others, while they might not know how flawed they are.

But how can I develop an inner discipline? Does that need to come from an understanding!? I know that I’m developing one. And I feel happy about it.

I forgot to say one more thing. I feel like, if I met C as a passenger like a person who goes to the airport, I would never be close to her like I was in Taiwan. Life is strange. Relationships are based on contexts. And it’s a mystery I would never dare to say I can understand it.

[gwenlittle7]

Eat Like The Locals – Asian Cafe 1

A Beautiful Restaurant Serving Amazing Dishes!

The Tri-Cities offers so many places to eat! Which is awesome because as a family of foodies, we love to eat out. We decided to include this series of local restaurant reviews on the blog so that we can spare you the less than awesome restaurant destinations (we have found a few) and direct you to our favorite restaurants where you can really enjoy the food!

This week we are reviewing Asian Cafe 1 Hibachi Grill and Sushi Bar. We love this place! This makes for a fun family dinner! You can enjoy your meal and entertainment if you choose to watch them cook in front of you, which we often do! T thinks their knife work is stellar! I’m partial to their hats 🙂 Mr. Wonderful just loves the flavors.

[su_note note_color=”#f8f8c1″]Please note – This site does include affiliate links. If you purchase an item from one of these affiliates we do receive a small percentage at no additional charge to you.[/su_note]

While family nights out are great here we also enjoy going to Asian Cafe 1 for date nights. The restaurant is lovely! Deep wood, beautiful art, giant lanterns, and exposed brick all come together to create a warm atmosphere plus the service is great!

Let’s Talk About The Menu at Asian Cafe 1

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Lunch Time Awesomeness – The Bento Box

If you are looking for an awesome lunch we recommend the Bento Box. Before discovering Asian Cafe 1 I didn’t know what a Bento Box was. Mr. Wonderful had told me that the next time I ran by Sam’s Club or stopped in at Barnes and Noble that I should run into Asian Cafe 1 and get a Bento Box.

Wikipedia Defines The Bento Box:Bento (弁当bentō)[1] is a single-portion take-out or home-packed meal common in Japanese cuisine. A traditional bento holds rice or noodles, fish or meat, with pickled and cooked vegetables, in a box.

At Asian Cafe 1 you can get your own Bento Box for less than $10 and it includes salad, crab rangoon (2 pieces), California Rolls (4 pieces), and rice (steamed, brown, or fried). You can choose between Tofu (teriyaki, tempura, sesame, or General Tso’s), Chicken (teriyaki, tempura, sesame, katsu, or General Tso’s), Shrimp (tempura or teriyaki), Beef teriyaki. or Salmon teriyaki.

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Spectacular Sushi

Their Signature Sushi Bar offers twenty delightful options. If you would prefer a roll or handroll (like me) then you have over twenty options to choose from. The California Roll is my favorite and the Crab Rangoon Roll Is T’s favorite.

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Wondering  – What Is The Difference Between A Roll and A Hand Roll?

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Asian Cafe 1 offers many options of sushi and sashimi a la carte or in meals. You can view all the many options here.

Wondering – What is the difference between sushi and sashimi?

According to Diffen:

Sashimi is thinly sliced raw meat—usually fish, such as salmon or tuna—that is served without rice. Sushi is not raw fish, but rather vinegared rice that is mixed with other ingredients, which may or may not include raw fish.

(Read Full Article with Comparison Chart Here)

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The Hibachi Grill

This is where the fun is happening at Asian Cafe 1! The chefs are so entertaining and the flavor is outstanding!

The Hibachi dinner includes soup, salad, rice or lo-mein. shrimp appetizer, veggies, and your choice of either Vegetable Delight, Chicken, Tofu, Steak, Shrimp, Calamari, Filet Mignon, Tuna, Salmon, Swordfish, Scallop, Lobster Tail, or your choice of combination!

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Kitchen Signature Entrees

Finally, we get to the part of the menu I am determined to work my way through, item by item. Did you ever wonder how good real Ramen is? These menu items take your taste buds around Asia. Ever wanted to try Indonesian Pho, Spicy Asian Curry, or find out what exactly Bakmi or Bihun is?

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Asian Cafe 1 Specials:

Hibachi Night: Tuesday 4pm-9pm

Single Meat (Chicken/Shrimp/Steak/Veggies) at $9.99

Hibachi Combo: Any Two Meat from Chicken, Shrimp, Steak and Veggies at $13.99

Sushi Night: Wednesday 4pm-9pm

$3.99 per basic roll

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Location and Contact Information for Asian Cafe 1

Location: 3020 Franklin Terrace – Suite 6 – Johnson City, TN 37604

Phone: 423-722-3838

Website

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Thanks for visiting Geez, Gwen today! We are so glad you found us! We are not believers in coincidence so we are confident you are here for a reason! Perhaps we can offer you more tasty recipes? Maybe our inspirational quotes are just what you need in your life! Perhaps you’ve been wondering where to take that family vacation? Maybe you want to know the truth about what us homeschoolers really do all day! Maybe you love photography and see it as an art, just like me! Whatever it is, it’s clearly Destiny at its finest! Don’t let this opening door of opportunity slam shut! Run through by subscribing to our newsletter 🙂  

So happy to see you here! Wishing you a life overflowing with blessings,

Gwen

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[su_note note_color=”#f8f8c1″]Some posts on this blog contain affiliate links. I receive a small commission whenever a product is purchased through these links. Occasionally I receive products in exchange for a review or giveaway post. The owner of this website, is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking http://geezgwen.com to Amazon properties including, but not limited to, amazon.com, endless.com, myhabit.com, smallparts.com, or amazonwireless.com. However, all opinions expressed on Geez Gwen are solely my own, and I only suggest products or services that I believe will be helpful to my readers.[/su_note]

    Eat Like The Locals – Asian Cafe 1 Review Eat Like The Locals – Asian Cafe 1 A Beautiful Restaurant Serving Amazing Dishes! The Tri-Cities offers so many places to eat!

[slidely]

How Tech Companies Are Making Amazing Video Content

Ever wondered what the content leaders in high-tech are doing to make media magic? It’s likely no surprise by now to know that video has become the number one tool to grab engagement online. Between social media, lead generating ads, enticing emails and landing pages that keep visitors online longer, video provides a solution to the content deficit.

But don’t just take our word for it. We interviewed the masters of content marketing at global tech companies who are really making an impact with their marketing efforts.

Get a glimpse behind the curtain at how these masters are using videos to generate high performing content.

Hubspot

Tell us a little about your company…

HubSpot is a leading CRM, marketing, sales, and customer experience platform. Over 37,000 total customers in more than 90 countries use HubSpot’s award-winning software, services, and support to transform the way they attract, engage, and delight customers.

What is your favorite kind of content to create?

Multimedia content

How many videos do you publish on social media each month?

20-30

Where and how do you use videos?

We use video in almost all of our communication efforts — from case studies to live webinars to learning series to product updates. It’s a key way we attract people to our brand and how we educate and improve our relationships with our customers.

How have videos made an impact on your company?

Video is an extremely effective tool for both marketing and sales at HubSpot. It has been a key driver in growing our audience and engagement on Facebook and Instagram. Sales reps have tested out video by sending targeted prospecting and reconnect emails, leading to a 4X increase in opportunities. It’s also helped to improve the quality our blog content, giving reader’s another way to learn about a topic and improving time spent on page.

Show us your favorite video creation from 2017!

  Where do you see the video trends going in 2018?

A recent HubSpot Research report found that video is the No. 1 type of content people want to see from brands, in addition to the fact that when comparing types of content, it was listed as the most memorable — over text and images.

In 2018, video will continue to drive success on social media. In the recent announcement on algorithm changes at Facebook that will deprioritize brand posts, Mark Zuckerberg made it clear that videos that drive interactions should be a part of your content mix.

Video will also gain momentum as part of a sophisticated SEO strategy. Search engine results continue to diversify in format — with more images, featured snippet boxes, and videos being displayed — so it’s how you’ll stay competitive.

In addition, I think more and more sales teams will start to use video in their efforts. Video has historically been used as a TOFU tool to drive brand awareness, and it can be difficult to track its effectiveness. Now, it’s easy and quick to create and distribute personalized videos that create a real connection with a prospective buyer.

  Buffer

Tell us a little about your company…

Buffer is a simpler and easier way to schedule posts, track the performance of your content, and manage all your accounts in one place.

What is your favorite kind of content to create?

Video content because of how robust and creative it can be!

How many videos do you publish on social media each month?

3-5

Where and how do you use videos?

All across social media (Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Instagram Stories) and also on our website.

How have videos made an impact on your company?

In 2017, we drove more than 2,000,000 video views on Facebook which led to more than 10,000 signups to Buffer from the platform. Video has been an incredible brand awareness tool for Buffer – allowing us to connect and reach a large audience across social media and our website in ways that text and images can’t.

Show us your favorite video creation from 2017!

This video on how to create a GIF from scratch drove over 300,000 views across Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Plus, it was super fun to create!

Where do you see the video trends going in 2018?

Video will be the #1 focus for marketers and brands in 2018. I see Facebook video becoming a key component of lots of businesses’ social media strategies as well as the dramatic rise of the use of Instagram Stories. Facebook and Instagram video will dominate the space in 2018!

  Promo

Tell us a little about your company…

Promo is the #1 video creation solution for businesses and agencies. Our groundbreaking service gives users access to over 3.5 million premium video clips and hand-picked music complete with a lifetime license. With Promo, you can create professional videos in a matter of minutes to promote anything anywhere on the internet.

What is your favorite kind of content to create?

Well, certainly my favorite content to create is video. To dive a little deeper, I like to create content that has a creative edge or a twist on what a viewer would expect. That little element of surprise and playfulness adds a lot to our brand value and is an exciting brain exercise as well to keep our team on our toes. When it comes to platforms, I think the real-time trending content for social media and anything that includes gifs and/or emojis is a blast.

How many videos do you publish on social media each month?

Between social media, paid ads, emails and our blog we easily create 15 fresh videos each week.

Where and how do you use videos?

Videos are our DNA. Aside from within our product and on our own website and landing pages, we use video for all marketing efforts. Our videos are published across social media channels, all of our paid ad campaigns, within emails and inside our blog posts.

How have videos made an impact on your company?

We exclusively use our own product in order to grow our business. In just over a year we grew to $1.3 million MRR using video marketing.

Show us your favorite video creation from 2017!

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You need funny videos? We got them!Awesome Marketing Videos – Just add your logo & message.

Posted by Promo on Thursday, April 27, 2017

Where do you see the video trends going in 2018?

The video trend is booming and it certainly gives no signs of slowing down. In fact, 85% of businesses regard video as an important part of their marketing strategy. We foresee every business, big and small, needing to invest in video making solutions to stand-out online and show their personality as well as capture attention in an overpopulated landscape. With platforms such as Promo making democratizing the video creation process, we expect that images will become a marketing tool of the past and video will occupy the ad space fully.

  WordStream

Tell us a little about your company…

WordStream’s software and services help businesses maximize returns from their online advertising efforts. We streamline workflows, synthesize insights, and provide prescriptive recommendations designed to shield busy marketers and business owners from the complexities of AdWords, Facebook, and Bing, simplifying business growth and saving you money.

What is your favorite kind of content to create?

As someone who bangs out written words on the daily, I’d have to say my favorite kind of content to create is, uh, blog posts.

How many videos do you publish on social media each month?

3-5 (but this is about to grow!)

Where and how do you use videos?

Until recently, we’ve typically used video to promote contests and to assuage concerns around the OAuth process. We’ve also used Promo videos as Facebook ads to drive engagement on subjects that are in vogue for a short period (major Google announcements, etc.); the quick turnaround tends to make them a no-brainer when it comes to inciting more social shares with little legwork. This year, though, we’re working on introducing a recurring video series to provide our wealth of site visitors and existing customers with a new medium through which to learn about PPC (believe it or not, AdWords, Facebook, and Bing can be hella confusing).

How have videos made an impact on your company?

Videos have given us a more dynamic avenue for content promotion, but it represents a relatively untapped medium for us (to date). Moving forward, we see video as a way to produce unique, digestible, actionable content that folks can use to learn more about both the WordStream brand and PPC.

Show us your favorite video creation from 2017!

Where do you see the video trends going in 2018?

I think quality engagement will overtake virality as video’s ideal outcome. Facebook’s overhaul of the News Feed is the first step in dampening the impact of the 15 second “look at my shiny bauble, buy my shiny bauble” riff raff that runs rampant on social channels. Moving forward, brands that can provide tangible value through video will rule the roost.

  Outbrain

Tell us a little about your company…

Outbrain is the world’s leading performance-driven discovery and native advertising platform. We help advertisers get discovered on leading publishers websites.

What is your favorite kind of content to create?

Video, of course.

How many videos do you publish on social media each month?

5-6

Where and how do you use videos?

We use videos for click to play on our platform as well as for high engagement social content on both Linkedin and Facebook.

How have videos made an impact on your company?

It is clear to us when looking at all of our marketing efforts that videos are the best and most compelling way to tell a story!

Show us your favorite video creation from 2017!

Where do you see the video trends going in 2018?

TV-Style Programming on Social Media Platforms and Outbrain itself.

  Drip

Tell us a little about your company…

Drip is the world’s first ECRM–an E-commerce CRM designed for building personal and profitable relationships with your customers at scale. We’re building cutting edge marketing tools and bringing them to the e-commerce world. We offer comprehensive tracking, hyper-segmentation, and robust email marketing automation, all designed for those who sell something online.

What is your favorite kind of content to create?

Engaging content. It sounds cliché, but—our favorite content is engaging. If it doesn’t engage our audience, it’s honestly not worth making in the first place. For us, that can be interactive online experiences, gifs, blog posts, and often videos.

How many videos do you publish on social media each month?

Lately, less than we’d like. We’ve rebuilt our video team, and at peak performance this quarter we’ll be putting out at least 2 – 4 videos every month.

Where and how do you use videos?

We use videos to complement our blog posts, in social media advertising, in our software app to help educate users, to announce new product features, on Instagram and Facebook, and on YouTube. We use video to engage our audience, educate them, and entertain them—hopefully, all three things at once, if we can.

How have videos made an impact on your company?

Video has been essential to us—from educational webinars to social media ads, to product demo videos, and more. Since our company began, we’ve uploaded over 1,000 videos that have netted over 1,000,000 plays. That kind of engagement, attention, and value added, is crucial to the growth and success of our company.

Show us your favorite video creation from 2017!

Where do you see the video trends going in 2018?

In 2018 video will only grow more. The barriers to entry continue to drop, making video easier to create, host, and distribute for teams of all sizes. And as social media platforms and news sites continue to be less and less shy about their preference for video content, we’ll only see more video in all the places we interact with the internet. We’ll make more of video and ingest more video as both marketers and consumers than we ever have before, in 2018.

  Playbuzz

Tell us a little about your company…

Playbuzz is a leading, Disney-backed storytelling platform used by premium publishers and brands worldwide to author, distribute and monetize interactive stories that drive audience engagement.

What is your favorite kind of content to create?

Stories that are visual-first, interactive and data-driven.

How many videos do you publish on social media each month?

We consistently incorporate videos into our social media posts thanks to Playbuzz’s AI-powered video tool which enables the quick creation of visually-stunning video content – no video or editing experience necessary.

Where and how do you use videos?

In addition to utilizing our own video tool to increase engagement across our social channels, we promote our video tool to our publisher partners as a great way to elevate their articles. In fact, data taken from 8,000 interactive articles powered by Playbuzz spanning the last 6 months of 2017 – created by publishers like Sky News, HuffPost and more – shows that articles with video boast 7X higher session times than those without.

How have videos made an impact on your company?

Video is vital to great storytelling, which we know from working with premium publishers like BBC, MTV, Netflix and more. This is why we are constantly adding capabilities to Playbuzz’s video tool to ensure that content creators of all levels have the ability to craft great videos. That said, video should not be utilized as a text replacement, but as another tool in the toolbox which editorial teams rely on to tell their stories. Video, coupled with text and interactive storytelling elements – including polls, flip cards and ranked lists – will result in stories that drive the most audience engagement.

Show us your favorite video creation from 2017!

Last year we celebrated $35M more in funding, from all existing investors including Disney. Here’s a video showcasing our excitement:

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Are you ready for more? #PoweredByPlaybuzz

Posted by Playbuzz for Business on Monday, October 2, 2017

Where do you see the video trends going in 2018?

2018 is the year publishers stop doing video for the sake of doing video. It’s time we understand the long-term impact of publishers aimlessly placing irrelevant video into content and instead rely on solutions that enable us to monetize relevant editorial via video, while still upholding a positive UX.

Let’s stop pivoting to video, and instead pivot to those expected to view them: readers.

  Monday

Tell us a little about your company…

monday.com is a team management tool designed to help you work better together. The platform is used by teams of all sizes to manage every detail of their work, from high-level roadmap planning to the specifics of day-to-day tasks, while building a culture of transparency.

What is your favorite kind of content to create?

It’s hard to choose just one! At monday.com, we love taking all different kinds of content and assembling them into a coordinated campaign– blog posts, news articles, social posts, and of course videos, all work really well in conjunction.

How many videos do you publish on social media each month?

As many as we can!

Where and how do you use videos?

We use videos anywhere and everywhere. From showcasing how our users work with monday.com to sharing our most important brand messages, to how-tos and tutorial movies, video is an essential part of how we communicate. It’s our way to express our brand in a unique voice and a visually engaging way.

How have videos made an impact on your company?

Videos have made a tremendous impact on our company. We rely on them as an essential part of our content creation strategy. They say a picture’s worth a thousand words, but a video is worth a million! We’ve seen a tremendous impact from using videos to communicate with our current users as well as attracting new ones.

Show us your favorite video creation from 2017!

It’s a tie! This is for sure our video of the year:

But this one is brand new and a new direction we’re really excited about:

Where do you see the video trends going in 2018?

Video is an essential part of our 2018 plan. We’re bolstering our in-house video team and they already have so many new incredible and creative ideas! They are working on refining our YouTube channel right now and keep adding awesome content to it. Check it out!

  Lemonade

Tell us a little about your company…

Lemonade is a licensed insurance carrier, offering homeowners and renters insurance powered by tech and based on behavioral econ. By replacing brokers and bureaucracy with bots and machine learning, Lemonade promises zero paperwork and instant everything. And as a Certified B-Corp, where underwriting profits go to nonprofits, Lemonade is remaking insurance as a social good, rather than a necessary evil.

What is your favorite kind of content to create?

Video 🙂 More specifically, we like creating content featuring our Chief Behavioral Officer, Prof. Dan Ariely. There’s something magical that happens with the dissonance created when Prof. Ariely, an academic and world-acclaimed behavioral economist, gives science-backed answers to everyday life questions such as how to divide expenses between roommates, maintain a happy household, or improve our productivity at work. It’s unexpected; but also practical. Moreover, it’s a story, one we believe gives great value to our community.

How many videos do you publish on social media each month?

We create at least a few each month.

Where and how do you use videos?

We use videos all the time, from stuff like our Life Hacks ft. Dan Ariely to shorts on how to use new features inside of the Lemonade App. You’ll see our videos just about everywhere – from articles to landing pages on our website and of course on our social media channels. We also find that video is especially valuable as it’s relevant for all types of content. Taking Life Hacks as an example, you’ll see these videos crop up in places such as in-depth behavioral economic pieces on our blog such as The Science Behind Why It’s So Hard To Save. and also broken down into shorts on our Instagram.

Show us your favorite video creation from 2017!

  WalkMe

Tell us a little about your company…

WalkMe is the pioneer of the Digital Adoption Platform (DAP), a B2B SaaS product that uses on-screen guidance to simplify any digital experience.

What is your favorite kind of content to create?

Definitely video, interactive or multimedia content pieces. I love making content that will grab viewers attention in new and interesting ways.

How many videos do you publish on social media each month?

We aim for two original videos plus re-posts of other videos we love.

Where and how do you use videos?

Our videos are mostly used for social media marketing, but in some cases we also create a complementary blog post to maximize the impact of each piece.

How have videos made an impact on your company?

We have seen a huge boost in engagement, especially when we feature our employees.

Show us your favorite video creation from 2017!

Where do you see the video trends going in 2018?

We see video becoming a much bigger part of our B2B marketing strategy. This year we plan to make video a much bigger emphasis, from the light and shareable category to live information sessions to thought leadership.

  YotPo

Tell us a little about your company…

Yotpo is the leading customer content marketing platform for commerce brands. With Yotpo, businesses can collect every type of user-generated content and use it to build a stronger brand and better customer experience. Yotpo’s integrated solution lets brands collect, curate, manage and respond to user-generated content from a single platform. Through a combination of technology, integrations, and partnerships, Yotpo makes it easy to effectively leverage customer content throughout the buyer journey to increase trust, social proof, and sales.

What is your favorite kind of content to create?

Is it a cop-out to say everything? I guess in a nutshell, good content based on a solid, thought-out story is my favorite to create. It’s important every piece of content — whether a blog post, a webinar, an email course, or an ebook — has a strong story and message.

How many videos do you publish on social media each month?

Varies, but a lot.

Where and how do you use videos?

We use videos for everything! From branding and showcasing company culture to helping customers better visualize our product with support tutorials.

How have videos made an impact on your company?

With videos, it’s really about finding the right story and messaging for the purpose you’re trying to achieve. A video for HR about a recent event is great for recruiting and branding your company’s culture, while a product video is likely best for acquisition ads for down-the-funnel prospects.

Show us your favorite video creation from 2017!

It’s a tough tie 🙂

Where do you see the video trends going in 2018?

We’re going to be investing a lot more in case study videos to showcase our clients’ success and stories.

  Needls

Tell us a little about your company…

Needls is an automated social media advertising platform. We use AI to create, target, test and optimize digital ads 24/7 on Facebook and Instagram.

What is your favorite kind of content to create?

Hands down: video. I’m a writer by trade, so it’s a little odd to say, but videos are just so engaging and get such a great response – especially when they’re full of creativity and personality.

How many videos do you publish on social media each month?

It depends, but we aim for once a week at least.

Where and how do you use videos?

Everywhere! We do Facebook live sessions, video webinars, Instagram stories, video ads, and everything else there is to use one.

How have videos made an impact on your company?

Definitely. Our video content gets a higher organic reach, and our video ads have such a phenomenal conversion rate.  

Show us your favorite video creation from 2017!

Where do you see the video trends going in 2018?

Video is going to make even more of an impact in the coming year because affordable and high-quality video creation is accessible to more and more people. That means one thing: be more creative and push boundaries. In knowing that 90% of the Facebook audience uses the platform via mobile, that not only tells us that we need to focus on mobile dimensions for videos, but also that videos need to be used in more creative ways.

Last year, our CEO started thinking about different ways we can integrate video to increase sales, and that resulted in us creating a video chatbot (amazing, right?). Simply put, this year we’re going to see video used in some pretty astounding and out-of-the-box ways.

  Funneldash

Tell us a little about your company…

FunnelDash creates growth tools and analytics dashboards for digital marketing agencies that offer Facebook ad campaign services.

What is your favorite kind of content to create?

We publish 2 blog posts a week, plus Facebook lives and other social content.

How many videos do you publish on social media each month?

10-20

Where and how do you use videos?

We use video all over. We do a weekly Facebook live in our User Community. We use video in several of our Facebook ads. Even some of our blog post thumbnails are videos as well.

How have videos made an impact on your company?

We use a lot of video in our webinar reminder and follow-up sequences. We find they engage people more and get them excited about attending our webinars and help with conversion to purchase.

We also use a lot of videos in our Facebook ads and in our Knowledge Base/Help section on our website. We also add video to our blog posts when we’re demonstrating our software.

Show us your favorite video creation from 2017!

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Simple Sales Hack Helped Me Build A 7-Figure Agency

Wanna know the exact 3-step client funnel I used to generate over 7-figures in my marketing agency?Simply COMMENT and say “YES" and I’ll PM you an invite to my upcoming agency growth workshop.It’s all about how to build a 7-figure marketing agency.If you’ve started your agency but are struggling to great REAL high value clients then this LIVE workshop is for you.And if you’re still on the fence about starting your agency or getting your first few high-value clients, I'll just say this…I’m absolutely convinced that selling Facebook Marketing services is the EASIEST and MOST lucrative online business right now. 🔥Period.In fact, did you know there are over 5 million monthly Facebook advertisers and only 120,000 digital marketing agencies in the US? 🚀 You do the math. The problem is if you’re anything like me when I started first running Facebook ads for clients you’re failed attempt to “launch” looked a little bit like this…=> Try to learn Power Editor => Buy a Facebook ads course => Buy Facebook ads software=> Spend money on Facebook ads=> Lose money on Facebook ads=> Get frustrated=> Work for free to get their 1st client => Lose 1st client’s money=> Get fired by 1st client=> Get 2nd client=> Drown in 2nd client’s questions and demands => Spend hopeless nights in Excel creating client reports=> Beg and hope that client #2 eventually pays=> Scared to go get client #3 given how the last 2 went…I think you get the picture. It’s not fun or profitable for anyone. Luckily, there is a better way! 😎At FunnelDash, we've helped agencies all over the world deploy this exact simple 3-step client funnel to gain & retain high-ticket clients.The workshop is called… How To Build A 7-Figure Marketing Agency With A 3-Step High Ticket Client Funnel COMMENT below and say “YES” and I’ll PM you a link to reserve your seat for the upcoming workshop called…When you join us LIVE you’ll also learn… => How to choose and attract the most profitable clients.=> How to use a simple automated tool to bring in high-paying leads every month.=> How to gain instant authority with prospective clients even if you're not a Facebook ads expert and they’ve never heard of you before.=> How to deliver consultations & strategy sessions that easily convert leads into High-Ticket Clients=> How to consistently produce and show clients great results (so they happily keep paying $2,000 – $5,000 month after month) It’s a proven, repeatable process that you can easily scale to 7 figures even if you’re not a Facebook ads expert.There’s nothing like having your own client business when someone else has laid the foundation and done all the hard work for you.Seats are filling up fast cause it REALLY is LIVE so grab one now by COMMENTING below and I’ll PM you the details plus my handwritten client funnel map.

Posted by FunnelDash on Sunday, September 17, 2017

Where do you see the video trends going in 2018?

Video is the future of social media. You see more and more of it in your feed, as well as in ads and entertainment pieces. Now that everyone has a video camera in their pocket (on their phones) it’s just as easy to take a video instead of a picture.

Businesses are finally catching up and engaging with their customers more through video, since what attracts attention.

  Zest

Tell us a little about your company…

Zest is a scalable content distillation platform. We convert information overload into individualized professional knowledge using human-based computation and machine learning to separate and spread high-quality content.

What is your favorite kind of content to create?

Personal, transparent and authentic blog posts. We also LOVE and are slightly addicted to creating unique GIFs.

How many videos do you publish on social media each month?

Currently about 1.

Where and how do you use videos?

If we use video, we create videos that show our Zesty life on Social Media. We also produce Product related videos when there is a new feature.

Show us your favorite video creation from 2017!

Where do you see the video trends going in 2018?

The type of video content that will see the highest usage increase will be real, documentary-style.

This type of video content for brands is THE most authentic and engaging type of content they can produce.

Another type of content that will be more widely spread is User Generated Branded Content (UGBC). As mobile is in the hands of everyone and the usage communication apps and social apps are only increasing, brands will strive to incentivize their users to create more UGBD.

  Mobfox

Tell us a little about your company…

Mobfox is a world-leading, data-driven mobile SSP and exchange, providing publishers with all the tools they need to manage their ad serving, data layers, and monetization stack efficiently, transparently, and automatically. The company is connected to over 200 diversified and global demand sources and offers comprehensive support for all major ad formats including video, native, rich media, and display.

What is your favorite kind of content to create?

I love creating and sharing any type of content that gives our audience a behind-the-scenes look at our awesome team, services, and technology. We have an incredibly smart and talented team, and anything that allows us to show the people behind programmatic, and connect on a more human level with our followers is exactly the type of content I want to get out there.

How many videos do you publish on social media each month?

We publish at least two to three new videos each month on social media, and we’re looking to focus much more on video this year.

Where and how do you use videos?

We post videos on Youtube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. We use video for a variety of reasons: to share insights, presentations, talks, interviews, panels, tutorials, and also to share slideshows in a more engaging way.

How have videos made an impact on your company?

Videos have enabled us to better connect both personally and professionally with our clients and community on social media. Through video, we can share our services, explain new products, offer tutorials, and give a behind-the-scenes look at our cool tech and awesome team.

Show us your favorite video creation from 2017!

This is a video we created to show what it’s like to work at our company. It’s a collection of images and short clips that our designer put together quickly last year. What I love about it is that it was super simple to create, fun, and casual.

Where do you see the video trends going in 2018?

Video is becoming more and more accessible to the public. And the technology behind video is constantly evolving. In 2018, the possibilities are endless. We’ll probably see more social channels trying to compete with YouTube, a rise in video advertising, and an introduction of more formats. We should expect to see an increase in 360 videos, VR, AR, shoppable videos, and live video.

  Payoneer

Tell us a little about your company…

Since 2005, Payoneer’s cross-border payments platform has empowered millions of entrepreneurs and businesses anywhere in the world – from Cairo to California, Buenos Aires to Bangalore and Tel Aviv to Tokyo – to expand beyond their borders and grow successful, sustainable businesses. Thousands of leading companies and marketplaces including Airbnb, Amazon, Google, and Upwork rely on Payoneer’s services to send funds to their merchants worldwide.

What is your favorite kind of content to create?

Content that showcases our customer’s business story, their challenges, and most importantly, how Payoneer’s able to help them achieve growth and success.

How many videos do you publish on social media each month?

15-20

Where and how do you use videos?

We use video to communicate our value to both our existing users and in our nurturing and onboarding flows. Channels include email, social media, web and for the promotion of live events.

How have videos made an impact on your company?

Today, we use video as both a marketing and a communication tool. As a marketing tool, video serves as a great way to showcase our customer stories – putting their faces at the front and center. As a communication tool, our use of live video helps to shrink the geographical divide and directly connect our employees with our users – strengthening our brand equity and our relationships with customers.

Show us your favorite video creation from 2017!

Where do you see the video trends going in 2018?

We definitely see a trend towards more live video content that’s more authentic, less polished/produced and more personal. Live feeds allow for a greater focus on real-time interaction between companies and their users. By allowing the customer to steer the topic of conversation (through live comments and follow-up discussion), live video enables brands to achieve a greater, much more relevant level of engagement with their users. This type of two-way communication also helps us to continually fine-tune our content strategy.   

  ironSource

Tell us a little about your company…

We make free-to-play and free-to-use possible for over 1.2B people around the world. We build technologies that help app developers take their apps to the next level, including the industry’s largest in-app video network. Since only 2% of users pay to play, we provide tools to engage the other 98%. That’s why over 80K apps use our technologies to grow their app businesses, and why we’re working with leading companies like Big Fish Games, Zynga and Playrix. We care about good creative and making ads as enjoyable as your games, and our designers sit next to our performance team, making sure data informs every creative decision.

What is your favorite kind of content to create?

I’m a reader by nature, so I would normally tend towards classic text content. But since we started investing in creating videos, we’ve found that videos allow for a much more fun and impactful approach to communicating content – whatever the topic might be.

How many videos do you publish on social media each month?

2-3

Where and how do you use videos?

For everything from employer branding and employee engagement, to product, lead generation and brand awareness.

How have videos made an impact on your company?

Because videos are so eminently shareable and so easily consumed, we’ve found that for employees, our video content (both company and product focused) has been much more memorable than the content we’re creating in other formats.

Show us your favorite video creation from 2017!

Where do you see the video trends going in 2018?

I think we’re going to see videos get progressively shorter, and with that, the pressure to create really impactful, immediately engaging content will increase. In our overcrowded, oversaturated lives it’s always been critical to catch someone’s attention immediately, but the first few seconds of engagement have never been more important. The best example of this I’ve seen recently is this video by Toyota, which not only manages to serve as a great ad but manages to make fun of the 6-second video ad trend at the same time.

  Wistia

Tell us a little about your company…

Wistia provides creation, hosting, and analytics tools to help businesses communicate, connect, and convert in a more human way. With Wistia, businesses can improve their video performance and grow their audience.

What is your favorite kind of content to create?

Call me old-fashioned, but I love a good long-form blog post! Writing something that’s super helpful and informative that will ultimately provide a ton of value to the reader is my absolute favorite.

How many videos do you publish on social media each month?

We share quite a bit of video on social media! Usually, they are either related to a piece of content, or they are specific awareness videos. On average, I would say probably around 10 videos a month.

Where and how do you use videos?

We use video across the business here at Wistia, but as the Content Marketing Manager, I primarily use videos throughout our content and on social media channels. I’ve been playing around with video on Facebook and Instagram lately, and have seen some success with that. As far as content goes, we really look at each piece and then decide if there’s a way to make it more helpful and informative with a video, then we’ll create one. We also make videos if there are opportunities to add a more surprising, delightful element to the page.

How have videos made an impact on your company?

As a video hosting and creation platform, we obviously care a lot about video, and also use it across the business. Our sales team has seen a ton of success with using video in their outreach efforts, and even our support team uses video to give more detailed super-human responses. We use video on the marketing in all sorts of ways, from ads, to social media, email to even internal communications! We’ve really embedded video (no pun intended) into our everyday lives here at Wistia—it’s made a huge impact on our company, culture, and the way we work.

Show us your favorite video creation from 2017!

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The 2017 Wistia Rap-Up

Grab some Kleenex and a bottle of champagne, and relive Wistia's favorite moments from 2017 in our annual "rap-up" video! wi.st/rapup

Posted by Wistia on Wednesday, December 20, 2017

Where do you see the video trends going in 2018?

I think we’ll see a ton more video being made and used across the web. Businesses know they need to invest more in video to stay relevant, and there are now a bunch of awesome tools that can help you make video easily on a small budget. I think content marketers, in particular, will really start using video to promote the content they create and to make their content stand out from the rest.

  After seeing such successful companies share insights on creating compelling content and using video more and more, we can easily see that video marketing is not a trend. It is here to stay and will continue to grow in the years to come.

Ready to create your own videos? Try Promo Today!

How Tech Companies Are Making Amazing Video Content was originally published on Promo by Slidely - Video ads and Marketing

[mediacalling]

A Simple 3-Step Approach to Increasing Conversions and ROI with Social Media Advertising

There’s so much to learn with social media advertising that it’s difficult to know exactly where to start.

For example, audience targeting, budgeting, A/B testing, pixel tracking, writing, designing, and analyzing all need to be taken into account if you want to see positive ROI from social media advertising.

There’s time and resources to consider as well.

Even incredibly talented social media managers that oversee multi-million dollar advertising budgets understand that it takes hundreds of experiments (and failures) to master the art of social media ads.

After speaking with top brands and marketers from around the globe, we’ve discovered a simple 3-step approach to successful social media advertising. This approach will help you bring all the various elements of advertising together in perfect harmony and how to drive more ROI from your ad spend.

Let’s dive in!

We’re super excited to bring you our brand new Skillshare class on social media advertising! This 50-minute, straightforward class will help you create a solid foundation for your brand or business on social media.

Bonus: We’re offering our community members two free months of Skillshare here (allowing you to access our class for free starting today!): http://skl.sh/buffer_advertising

A 3-step approach to social media advertising

Over the years, we’ve spent countless hours experimenting with various social media advertising strategies.

Whilst research each of these experiments, we found that there was a ton of awesome advice on tactics for each individual channel, but what we were missing was an overall strategic approach or “way of thinking” about social media advertising.

Instead of focusing on individual tactics and channels that frequently change, we wanted to focus on a blueprint that could be applied to any business or brand, no matter the industry or product. And that’s what I’d love to share with you below.

That social media advertising blueprint is broken up into three distinct stages:

Awareness (TOFU)

Consideration (MOFU)

Conversion (BOFU)

Unless you have a product that’s flying off the shelf or a viral marketing campaign, you’ll often need all three stages (awareness, consideration, and conversion) working in tandem to attract and acquire new customers.

Why all three stages are important

One of the things I hear most from businesses is that they’re having trouble finding success with social media advertising, particularly Facebook, in trying to sell their product or services.

Whenever we get that comment, one of the first questions we ask those businesses is: “Do you have any campaigns set up that aren’t simply trying to sell, but to generate awareness?”

More often than not the answer is “no.”

It can be quite a challenge to immediately begin selling your product through social media advertising. As a marketer, you have to be willing to build relationships with potential customers first before you ask for the purchase.

That’s where this idea of awareness, consideration, and conversions come into play.

Pros and cons of social media advertising

Pros:

Campaigns are easy to track

You can begin to drive traffic and conversions immediately (depending on your knowledge of your customers)

You’ll have a complete picture of the ROI on each campaign

Tons of targeting options, including: age, likes, interests, income bracket, location, and other demographics

Retargeting options for people who have interacted with your content or visited your website

Relative to other advertising mediums, social media can be extremely affordable (which we all love)

Cons:

Depending on your target market, a majority of the audience may be irrelevant – Leading to “wasted” ad spend

Easy to create ads and leave them without ever checking on performance which can also lead to costliness

Social media advertising requires a lot of time and attention in order to maximize results

Run the risk of what marketers call ad fatigue. Potential customers might be shown an ad too early or too often and be turned off

Larger investment upfront while you figure out a good combination of content, visuals, and copy

Here’s a quick video preview on the importance of social media advertising from our new Skillshare class:

Introduction to Social Media Advertising | Learn with Buffer

An Online Skillshare Class by Brian Peters

Social Media Advertising: Awareness Stage

In the awareness stage, people are either completely unfamiliar with your brand or are unaware that they have a pain point that needs to be solved.

Let’s use Nike as an example, many people have heard of Nike (and they probably even own a pair of Nike shoes or a piece of gear!)

If you’re a direct, somewhat unknown competitor of Nike, the awareness stage is a critical place to start with social media advertising. Reason being, Nike has a strong hold on the market in terms of brand awareness and affinity. People may not know that your shoes and/or gear is more competitively priced or better quality than Nike.

Awareness & organic content

One great strategy for increasing brand awareness is to focus on organic social media posting and amplifying your top performing content.

One of the biggest opportunities for so many brands with limited time and resources is to simply boost top performing posts from their page. Not only is this the most inexpensive form of social media advertising, but it also provides brands with a way to reach a new customer segment that they might not have been able to with traditional ads.

Organic social media content is a powerful catalyst in increasing word-of-mouth marketing. People are much less likely to share an advertisement that feels like an advertisement with their friends and family.

For example, we boosted a recent post on Facebook that highlighted a photo from one of our Buffer Community members. With just $100 dollars, these are the results we received:

We spend about 70% of our overall advertising budget on simply amplifying or “boosting” top performing content. Some of these boosted posts have reached up to 750,000 people with one or two hundred dollars. Where else can you reach 750,000 people for a few hundred bucks? It’s incredible!

Awareness & audience targeting

What I love most about TOFU social media advertising is that you can boost posts to specific, targeted audiences.

With Facebook, for example, you don’t have to use the “boost post” button that you see next to your posts in the feed. Instead, as a Page manager, you can use Facebook Ads Manager to create a campaign (such as traffic, engagement, or video views) to create a custom audience.

Then, once you’ve created a custom, highly-relevant audience, simply select the “use existing post” option.

This gives you total control over budget, goals, audience, and allows you to run boosted posts alongside all of your other campaigns so that you can compare results.

Boosted posts aren’t the only option for marketers in the awareness stage of social media advertising. You can advertise with fun articles, videos, graphics, memes, GIFs – anything that you know an audience will respond to and (ideally) share with their followers.

The main focus in the awareness stage is to create and share content that’s super-high-up in the funnel (TOFU). This content shouldn’t necessarily ask for a sale or be a product promotion. It should simply look to provide fun, useful, or entertaining content to an audience who is unaware of your brand or unaware that they have a pain point.

Going back to our Nike example, awareness-type content might be a video series on selecting the proper shoes for all types of activities, or it might be a complete comparison guide on the latest shoe fashion.

Anything that catches someone’s eye! This will help set your business up for the next stage, which is consideration.

Social Media Advertising: Consideration Stage

The second part of our 3-step approach is the consideration stage.

Consideration and conversions are what we consumers typically think about when they hear the word “advertising.”

Consideration, in particular, is the stage where people are either familiar with your product or recognize that they have a pain point and are researching options.

Pixel targeting

It’s in the consideration stage where honing in on proper targeting and retargeting can become a huge factor in the overall success of your ads. Targeting the correct audience can lead to higher conversions and lower costs.

We recommend having the basic Facebook Pixel set up on your website. You can find your unique pixel in Facebook Ads Manager under “Pixels.”

Installing the Pixel will allow you to track the behavior of users on your website and also target them with Facebook Ads in the future based on specific actions. It’s magical!

Here’s a what is will look like on Facebook after you’ve successfully installed your Pixel:

Keep in mind that many social media networks offer snippets of code that you can place on your website in order to fully track the success of your ads.

Other targeting options

If you don’t have a ton of website traffic at the moment, that’s OK! There are other great ways to target valuable audiences for your business on Facebook.

Lookalike Audiences

One of my favorite ways is the Lookalike custom audience option. Using Facebook’s sophisticated algorithm you can create a custom Lookalike audience that target’s users who are most likely to engage or purchase from your brand.

There are two great ways to go about creating a Lookalike audience.

One, you can upload an email list of your most valuable customers – ideally customers that have a high lifetime value (LTV), or customers you know that make repeated purchases. That gives Facebook a great place to start in understanding who to target.

Two, you can create a Lookalike audience based on your own Facebook Page audience. In other words, an audience that’s closely related to the people who currently like and engage with your page.

We’ve seen huge success with Lookalike audiences on Buffer’s Facebook Page.

Recently, we experimented with uploading a Mailchimp list of Buffer for Business and Awesome users to Facebook and created a Lookalike audience from there. Campaigns using this custom audience have resulted in a 30% lower CPC and a 11% higher conversion rate than our standard demographic-based audience.

Demographic-based audiences

Speaking of demographics, that’s the final (but still great) way to target users. You can target users based on age, location, mobile device, interests, income, job title, and tons more.

Where we’ve seen the most success is targeting users who like pages similar to ours. We might target users if they’ve liked pages such as Hootsuite, Jay Baer, Mari Smith, Social Media Examiner, Socialbakers, and other similar brands to Buffer.

How to approach the consideration stage

To quickly review, the consideration stage is where your customers are either aware of your brand or aware that they have a pain point that they’d like to solve. So it’s important to articulate your ads in such a way that speak to customers at this stage of their journey.

Similar to the awareness stage, people in the consideration stage still need a bit of guidance or time before making a purchase. In speaking to some big brands and people who specialize in Facebook Ads, successful content in this stage depends a lot on the value and perceived value that you’re providing.

Some great questions to ask here are:

What specifically are you providing users that is different than they are used to seeing, hearing, reading, and experiencing in on social media or in their industry?

Is what you’re advertising with so compelling that they had to click?

For example, let’s say your business is a marketing agency and you want to get more qualified prospects into your sales funnel. You started in the awareness stage and boosted one of your top performing posts on Facebook which drove some traffic to your website.

Awesome! Now what?

If you have Facebook Pixels set up on your website, you can create a Custom Audience based on traffic to that specific page and retarget those users with an add for another similar piece of content. Or you can target them with an invitation to an upcoming webinar on marketing strategy. Or, a free download of an ebook that you created on starting a business.

Since that audience already interacted with your content on Facebook and has now visited your website, you’ll have a much higher chance of getting them to sign up for something in the future and might even get their email address while you’re at it!

Here’s an example of a piece of consideration (MOFU) content we ran with HubSpot last year:

One more example of targeting in the consideration stage!

First, we created a TOFU video that was meant to purely drive views and engagement.

After posting the video organically to Facebook, we boosted it for extra views. After about 3 or 4 days the views climbed up into the thirty-thousand range.

We then created a Custom Audience based on people who watched more than 10 seconds of this video we created (making them a highly-engaged user). Within that custom audience, we excluded anyone who had visited Buffer.com or blog.buffer.com in the last 60 days.

Finally, we targeted a top performing and related blog post to this audience to drive traffic to our website.

This ad has driven more than 3,500 visits to our blog for less than $0.15 per click. All of which haven’t been to any of our pages within the last 60 days!

Which leaves us with one last stage, the money maker, conversions.

Social Media Advertising: Conversion Stage

The conversion stage is one of the trickiest stages to master, but those that get the hang of it can drive big results for their business.

Success in the conversion stage comes down to three critical components:

The quality of your targeting

The quality of your ads

The ability to track results.

It’s also worth noting that great conversion-focused ads almost always contain an irresistible offer.

For many companies, this might be a discount on a product, a free-trial, a coupon, a buy-one-get-one-free offer, or even the standard product in full price depending on the industry.

Along with this is the importance of being able to track results of your conversion ads through tools like the Facebook Pixel, Google Analytics, a product like AdRoll, or even maybe your brand’s CRM.

Understanding which campaigns are driving conversions, which campaigns are resulting in higher lifetime value customers, and which campaigns are losing money is super important in helping you to double down on what’s working and drop or iterate on what’s not.

Here’a a great graphic from our recent interview with Ian Cleary on creating a sales funnel that converts:

It’s important to note here that the word “conversion” doesn’t necessarily have to mean purchases or sales. A conversion can mean a variety of different things to different businesses.

You might find that a user who signs up for your webinar is much more valuable then someone who signs up for a free trial.

In that case, you’ll probably find it valuable to spend a majority of your ad dollars on webinar conversions, which you can track with a simple landing page and thank you page.

Speaking of budgeting, here’s a sneak peek at “Budgeting” from our new Skillshare class!

Introduction to Social Media Advertising | Learn with Buffer

An Online Skillshare Class by Brian Peters

The conversion stage is all about knowing how to track valuable pieces of content in every part of the customer journey.

Over to you!

Social media advertising can be a daunting venture for many businesses and marketers. It’s what prevented us ay Buffer from experimenting with ads for a long time.

Thinking of advertising in terms of the three different stages: awareness, consideration, and conversion, you’ll be well-ahead of 90% of the social media advertising marketers out there.

You can begin with the basics such as boosting posts to help build an audience that you can eventually target down the line. Or, you can jump right into the bottom of the funnel if you have a piece of content that you think would work particularly well.

We encourage you to get out there and try it for yourself!

We’re super excited to bring you our brand new Skillshare class on social media advertising! This 50-minute, straightforward class will help you create a solid foundation for your brand or business on social media.

A Simple 3-Step Approach to Increasing Conversions and ROI with Social Media Advertising posted first on http://ift.tt/2qbaJ0t

[mariemary1]

A Simple 3-Step Approach to Increasing Conversions and ROI with Social Media Advertising

There’s so much to learn with social media advertising that it’s difficult to know exactly where to start.

For example, audience targeting, budgeting, A/B testing, pixel tracking, writing, designing, and analyzing all need to be taken into account if you want to see positive ROI from social media advertising.

There’s time and resources to consider as well.

Even incredibly talented social media managers that oversee multi-million dollar advertising budgets understand that it takes hundreds of experiments (and failures) to master the art of social media ads.

After speaking with top brands and marketers from around the globe, we’ve discovered a simple 3-step approach to successful social media advertising. This approach will help you bring all the various elements of advertising together in perfect harmony and how to drive more ROI from your ad spend.

Let’s dive in!

We’re super excited to bring you our brand new Skillshare class on social media advertising! This 50-minute, straightforward class will help you create a solid foundation for your brand or business on social media.

Bonus: We’re offering our community members two free months of Skillshare here (allowing you to access our class for free starting today!): skl.sh/buffer_advertising

A 3-step approach to social media advertising

Over the years, we’ve spent countless hours experimenting with various social media advertising strategies.

Whilst research each of these experiments, we found that there was a ton of awesome advice on tactics for each individual channel, but what we were missing was an overall strategic approach or “way of thinking” about social media advertising.

Instead of focusing on individual tactics and channels that frequently change, we wanted to focus on a blueprint that could be applied to any business or brand, no matter the industry or product. And that’s what I’d love to share with you below.

That social media advertising blueprint is broken up into three distinct stages:

Awareness (TOFU)

Consideration (MOFU)

Conversion (BOFU)

Unless you have a product that’s flying off the shelf or a viral marketing campaign, you’ll often need all three stages (awareness, consideration, and conversion) working in tandem to attract and acquire new customers.

Why all three stages are important

One of the things I hear most from businesses is that they’re having trouble finding success with social media advertising, particularly Facebook, in trying to sell their product or services.

Whenever we get that comment, one of the first questions we ask those businesses is: “Do you have any campaigns set up that aren’t simply trying to sell, but to generate awareness?”

More often than not the answer is “no.”

It can be quite a challenge to immediately begin selling your product through social media advertising. As a marketer, you have to be willing to build relationships with potential customers first before you ask for the purchase.

That’s where this idea of awareness, consideration, and conversions come into play.

Pros and cons of social media advertising

Pros:

Campaigns are easy to track

You can begin to drive traffic and conversions immediately (depending on your knowledge of your customers)

You’ll have a complete picture of the ROI on each campaign

Tons of targeting options, including: age, likes, interests, income bracket, location, and other demographics

Retargeting options for people who have interacted with your content or visited your website

Relative to other advertising mediums, social media can be extremely affordable (which we all love)

Cons:

Depending on your target market, a majority of the audience may be irrelevant – Leading to “wasted” ad spend

Easy to create ads and leave them without ever checking on performance which can also lead to costliness

Social media advertising requires a lot of time and attention in order to maximize results

Run the risk of what marketers call ad fatigue. Potential customers might be shown an ad too early or too often and be turned off

Larger investment upfront while you figure out a good combination of content, visuals, and copy

Here’s a quick video preview on the importance of social media advertising from our new Skillshare class:

Introduction to Social Media Advertising | Learn with Buffer

An Online Skillshare Class by Brian Peters

Social Media Advertising: Awareness Stage

In the awareness stage, people are either completely unfamiliar with your brand or are unaware that they have a pain point that needs to be solved.

Let’s use Nike as an example, many people have heard of Nike (and they probably even own a pair of Nike shoes or a piece of gear!)

If you’re a direct, somewhat unknown competitor of Nike, the awareness stage is a critical place to start with social media advertising. Reason being, Nike has a strong hold on the market in terms of brand awareness and affinity. People may not know that your shoes and/or gear is more competitively priced or better quality than Nike.

Awareness & organic content

One great strategy for increasing brand awareness is to focus on organic social media posting and amplifying your top performing content.

One of the biggest opportunities for so many brands with limited time and resources is to simply boost top performing posts from their page. Not only is this the most inexpensive form of social media advertising, but it also provides brands with a way to reach a new customer segment that they might not have been able to with traditional ads.

Organic social media content is a powerful catalyst in increasing word-of-mouth marketing. People are much less likely to share an advertisement that feels like an advertisement with their friends and family.

For example, we boosted a recent post on Facebook that highlighted a photo from one of our Buffer Community members. With just $100 dollars, these are the results we received:

We spend about 70% of our overall advertising budget on simply amplifying or “boosting” top performing content. Some of these boosted posts have reached up to 750,000 people with one or two hundred dollars. Where else can you reach 750,000 people for a few hundred bucks? It’s incredible!

Awareness & audience targeting

What I love most about TOFU social media advertising is that you can boost posts to specific, targeted audiences.

With Facebook, for example, you don’t have to use the “boost post” button that you see next to your posts in the feed. Instead, as a Page manager, you can use Facebook Ads Manager to create a campaign (such as traffic, engagement, or video views) to create a custom audience.

Then, once you’ve created a custom, highly-relevant audience, simply select the “use existing post” option.

This gives you total control over budget, goals, audience, and allows you to run boosted posts alongside all of your other campaigns so that you can compare results.

Boosted posts aren’t the only option for marketers in the awareness stage of social media advertising. You can advertise with fun articles, videos, graphics, memes, GIFs – anything that you know an audience will respond to and (ideally) share with their followers.

The main focus in the awareness stage is to create and share content that’s super-high-up in the funnel (TOFU). This content shouldn’t necessarily ask for a sale or be a product promotion. It should simply look to provide fun, useful, or entertaining content to an audience who is unaware of your brand or unaware that they have a pain point.

Going back to our Nike example, awareness-type content might be a video series on selecting the proper shoes for all types of activities, or it might be a complete comparison guide on the latest shoe fashion.

Anything that catches someone’s eye! This will help set your business up for the next stage, which is consideration.

Social Media Advertising: Consideration Stage

The second part of our 3-step approach is the consideration stage.

Consideration and conversions are what we consumers typically think about when they hear the word “advertising.”

Consideration, in particular, is the stage where people are either familiar with your product or recognize that they have a pain point and are researching options.

Pixel targeting

It’s in the consideration stage where honing in on proper targeting and retargeting can become a huge factor in the overall success of your ads. Targeting the correct audience can lead to higher conversions and lower costs.

We recommend having the basic Facebook Pixel set up on your website. You can find your unique pixel in Facebook Ads Manager under “Pixels.”

Installing the Pixel will allow you to track the behavior of users on your website and also target them with Facebook Ads in the future based on specific actions. It’s magical!

Here’s a what is will look like on Facebook after you’ve successfully installed your Pixel:

Keep in mind that many social media networks offer snippets of code that you can place on your website in order to fully track the success of your ads.

Other targeting options

If you don’t have a ton of website traffic at the moment, that’s OK! There are other great ways to target valuable audiences for your business on Facebook.

Lookalike Audiences

One of my favorite ways is the Lookalike custom audience option. Using Facebook’s sophisticated algorithm you can create a custom Lookalike audience that target’s users who are most likely to engage or purchase from your brand.

There are two great ways to go about creating a Lookalike audience.

One, you can upload an email list of your most valuable customers – ideally customers that have a high lifetime value (LTV), or customers you know that make repeated purchases. That gives Facebook a great place to start in understanding who to target.

Two, you can create a Lookalike audience based on your own Facebook Page audience. In other words, an audience that’s closely related to the people who currently like and engage with your page.

We’ve seen huge success with Lookalike audiences on Buffer’s Facebook Page.

Recently, we experimented with uploading a Mailchimp list of Buffer for Business and Awesome users to Facebook and created a Lookalike audience from there. Campaigns using this custom audience have resulted in a 30% lower CPC and a 11% higher conversion rate than our standard demographic-based audience.

Demographic-based audiences

Speaking of demographics, that’s the final (but still great) way to target users. You can target users based on age, location, mobile device, interests, income, job title, and tons more.

Where we’ve seen the most success is targeting users who like pages similar to ours. We might target users if they’ve liked pages such as Hootsuite, Jay Baer, Mari Smith, Social Media Examiner, Socialbakers, and other similar brands to Buffer.

How to approach the consideration stage

To quickly review, the consideration stage is where your customers are either aware of your brand or aware that they have a pain point that they’d like to solve. So it’s important to articulate your ads in such a way that speak to customers at this stage of their journey.

Similar to the awareness stage, people in the consideration stage still need a bit of guidance or time before making a purchase. In speaking to some big brands and people who specialize in Facebook Ads, successful content in this stage depends a lot on the value and perceived value that you’re providing.

Some great questions to ask here are:

What specifically are you providing users that is different than they are used to seeing, hearing, reading, and experiencing in on social media or in their industry?

Is what you’re advertising with so compelling that they had to click?

For example, let’s say your business is a marketing agency and you want to get more qualified prospects into your sales funnel. You started in the awareness stage and boosted one of your top performing posts on Facebook which drove some traffic to your website.

Awesome! Now what?

If you have Facebook Pixels set up on your website, you can create a Custom Audience based on traffic to that specific page and retarget those users with an add for another similar piece of content. Or you can target them with an invitation to an upcoming webinar on marketing strategy. Or, a free download of an ebook that you created on starting a business.

Since that audience already interacted with your content on Facebook and has now visited your website, you’ll have a much higher chance of getting them to sign up for something in the future and might even get their email address while you’re at it!

Here’s an example of a piece of consideration (MOFU) content we ran with HubSpot last year:

One more example of targeting in the consideration stage!

First, we created a TOFU video that was meant to purely drive views and engagement.

After posting the video organically to Facebook, we boosted it for extra views. After about 3 or 4 days the views climbed up into the thirty-thousand range.

We then created a Custom Audience based on people who watched more than 10 seconds of this video we created (making them a highly-engaged user). Within that custom audience, we excluded anyone who had visited Buffer.com or blog.buffer.com in the last 60 days.

Finally, we targeted a top performing and related blog post to this audience to drive traffic to our website.

This ad has driven more than 3,500 visits to our blog for less than $0.15 per click. All of which haven’t been to any of our pages within the last 60 days!

Which leaves us with one last stage, the money maker, conversions.

Social Media Advertising: Conversion Stage

The conversion stage is one of the trickiest stages to master, but those that get the hang of it can drive big results for their business.

Success in the conversion stage comes down to three critical components:

The quality of your targeting

The quality of your ads

The ability to track results.

It’s also worth noting that great conversion-focused ads almost always contain an irresistible offer.

For many companies, this might be a discount on a product, a free-trial, a coupon, a buy-one-get-one-free offer, or even the standard product in full price depending on the industry.

Along with this is the importance of being able to track results of your conversion ads through tools like the Facebook Pixel, Google Analytics, a product like AdRoll, or even maybe your brand’s CRM.

Understanding which campaigns are driving conversions, which campaigns are resulting in higher lifetime value customers, and which campaigns are losing money is super important in helping you to double down on what’s working and drop or iterate on what’s not.

Here’a a great graphic from our recent interview with Ian Cleary on creating a sales funnel that converts:

It’s important to note here that the word “conversion” doesn’t necessarily have to mean purchases or sales. A conversion can mean a variety of different things to different businesses.

You might find that a user who signs up for your webinar is much more valuable then someone who signs up for a free trial.

In that case, you’ll probably find it valuable to spend a majority of your ad dollars on webinar conversions, which you can track with a simple landing page and thank you page.

Speaking of budgeting, here’s a sneak peek at “Budgeting” from our new Skillshare class!

Introduction to Social Media Advertising | Learn with Buffer

An Online Skillshare Class by Brian Peters

The conversion stage is all about knowing how to track valuable pieces of content in every part of the customer journey.

Over to you!

Social media advertising can be a daunting venture for many businesses and marketers. It’s what prevented us ay Buffer from experimenting with ads for a long time.

Thinking of advertising in terms of the three different stages: awareness, consideration, and conversion, you’ll be well-ahead of 90% of the social media advertising marketers out there.

You can begin with the basics such as boosting posts to help build an audience that you can eventually target down the line. Or, you can jump right into the bottom of the funnel if you have a piece of content that you think would work particularly well.

We encourage you to get out there and try it for yourself!

We’re super excited to bring you our brand new Skillshare class on social media advertising! This 50-minute, straightforward class will help you create a solid foundation for your brand or business on social media.

Thank A Simple 3-Step Approach to Increasing Conversions and ROI with Social Media Advertising for first publishing this post.