Have you ever clicked off a video because the presenter just seemed too fidgety? Too wooden? Too arrogant? Too timid? Video presentation is a great skill to learn, especially if you’re an executive or a business owner. Your manner, how you speak and how you dress are examined minutely, much more so than in real life. That’s because viewers are accustomed to watching professional actors and TV presenters, so they have high expectations of anyone who appears on their smartphone or TV screens. Whether you’re creating your videos for content marketing or training purposes, here are 4 tips to help you become a confident presenter. You are what you wear First impressions count for a lot, and are based on appearance. Even before you open your mouth, some people have made up their minds about you. The trick is to simply be yourself. Wear what you would normally wear when meeting with a client, not what you would wear to a special occasion. If the head of a not-for-profit organisation appears in a Chanel suit and pearl necklace, it might raise questions about her organisation’s priorities. (If you’re the editor of Vogue, it’s a different story.) Avoid wearing fabric with tight patterns, especially stripes and checks. Through the magic of television, these can cause a weird optical effect called a moiré pattern, where the fabric appears to ripple when you move. Don’t buy anything new for the video presentation – wear something familiar. You don’t want to discover that your new jacket is too tight around the chest just as you step in front of the camera. Speaking tips...
Business owners can no longer ignore the need to have a user-friendly, optimised website, and quality content – at least, not if they want to convert website visitors into customers and remain competitive. Yet every year we hear about startups failing to gain traction despite an innovative product and strong financial backing. And major corporations aren’t immune either. After failing to leverage the power of e-commerce in its early days, it was only last year that stuttering Toys ‘R’ Us announced a plan to revamp its website – part of a $100 million e-commerce strategy. But you might remember how that panned out. For many businesses, the website is often the first interaction a prospective client has with the brand. And it doesn’t matter what you sell – B2B or B2C, products or services – your ultimate goal is to convert the ‘potentials’ visiting your website into customers. If you aren’t converting visitors into customers, or views to sales, asking why should be a priority. Could it be something as simple as… You’re attracting (or targeting) the wrong audience This could be for any number of reasons. Does your website address issues more likely to interest small business, when your ideal clients are medium and large businesses? Are you building a young Instagram and Snapchat audience when your offering is more attractive to baby boomers? Setting up Google Analytics properly can provide valuable insights on your website visitors – their age, location, how they found your site, how long they stayed, the number of pages they visited. From there you can tweak your content or reconsider publishing platforms to...
It’s a sign of the times. Cosmopolitan, the iconic lifestyle magazine for (mostly) women, will cease publishing in December after 45 years. It joins a long list of magazines considered no longer financially viable. But do brand magazines still work? Our increasingly digital lives have put paid to traditional publishing – at least that’s the reason usually touted for the life-threatening struggle of magazines. What was once read on paper is now readily available in myriad sites online. Not so fast. Some mastheads haven’t survived the onslaught of digital media, but others are bucking the trend. Many brands still swear by magazines, which continue to achieve their aim of staying in touch with customers, engaging staff, and driving demand for products. Magazines can still play an integral role in a brand’s marketing strategy, delivering a tangible link with customers that no other medium has yet subsumed. Brand magazines for customers Goals of brand magazines may vary, but building customer loyalty is typically a primary objective. They can help to cross-sell and up-sell, keep people up to date with new product or service developments, and contribute to brand image. And the strategy goes back further than you might think. Porsche sold its first sports cars in 1948. By 1952 the company had produced issue one of Christophorus magazine for Porsche owners. It has produced five issues per year ever since, and now boasts a global circulation of 514,000 for its 100-plus-page publication in 11 languages. Issue 388 is currently available. This is one of many examples – in fact, brand magazines are considered by many to be content marketing in its...
Does your internal communications strategy incorporate storytelling as a tool? Prose that leads people to action can appear in the most unexpected places. A rare moment of poignancy from a tormented author. A whimsical sonnet scribed by a long-dead anonymous poet. Even a bare inner-city building can become a blank canvas for the literary-inclined – the legality of graffiti notwithstanding. Many of us hold a narrow view on where we should find moving phrases and flashes of verbal brilliance – in novels and memoirs, poetry and song. But what those people often forget is that we live in a hyper-digital world. Our pencil gave way to the keyboard years ago. Why, then, can’t we tell stories without pen and paper – why should it be reserved for fiction? Let’s go even further – beyond the explosion of online journalism, blogs, editorials and interactive novels. Why can’t we bring storytelling into the workplace? No one has ownership of business storytelling. And content marketing isn’t the only outlet to drive people to action. If you have a story to tell and you know how to tell it, why shouldn’t you drive that message home through your internal communications? After all, if a story about hobbits can lead universities the world over to create Lord of the Rings-specific courses, think what your business could achieve once you embrace storytelling. Storytelling in internal communications drives engagement The biggest corporate buzzword in recent years has been ‘engagement’. The C-suite wants every employee to be fully engaged while on the clock. Supervisors want to engage their teams on a personal level. But when you look...
It is time to create a brand communications style guide for your company? When you want to create a strong brand identity, build trust with your customers and make sure your brand is instantly recognisable, consistency is the key. This is easy enough to achieve if you’re a one-person operation doing your own copywriting, but when you have external writers or design and content agencies working on projects for your company, a brand communications style guide can become essential. A style guide lays out a clear framework for your communications, from the layout and font to the style and tone of the language used. A style guide can help you maintain a sense of consistency in your visual and written communications. A clear set of guidelines also makes it much easier for your writers and designers to do their job properly, resulting in better quality content, more recognisable brand values and a uniform message across different platforms. How to create a brand communications style guide Click To Tweet 7 things every brand communications style guide needs The idea behind a style guide is that it is as concise as possible – the easier it is to use, the more likely your team will refer to it rather than guesstimate what to do. While the details will vary depending on your brand, your style guide should include the following seven things as a minimum: Introduction: Always start with a clear introduction explaining the purpose of your style guide. Have headings for each section and include a contents page so people can find things quickly. Basic overview of writing guidelines: It might...
If you’re a service based business, you need to generate leads. But if you have no means of lead capture on your website, or for other lead generating activities, you’re probably allowing many prospective clients to slip away. Perhaps you’ve come across the term ‘lead capture’ while reading up on content marketing, but aren’t quite sure what sort of difference it would make to your business, or how you would implement it. Let’s take a look at what lead capture is, what the benefits are, and what’s involved in doing it. What is lead capture? Lead capture is the practice of inviting website visitors to register their details in order to receive content and/or further communication from you. In the simplest form, lead capture is that ‘subscribe to our newsletter’ or ‘subscribe for updates’ option you see on many sites. However, unless your content writers are turning out highly unique material and you have droves of people signing up, this doesn’t go far enough. One reason this isn’t sufficient for most service businesses, is that not all their prospective clients have precisely the same interests, challenges, pain points and buying motivations. Unless you’re able to segment your database into buyer types, and deliver the most relevant content to each, results with a newsletter subscription alone are likely to be mediocre. Another issue is in the timing. When someone subscribes to your blog or newsletter, that action doesn’t indicate what they’re interested in right now, or how you might help them. However, if they download an eBook related to a specific challenge, it’s a different story. What you have then is often...
