Posts Tagged ‘Video Marketing’

4 Types of Online Content to Use for Marketing Your Business

Monday, November 7th, 2011

Content Marketing can be extremely beneficial for your business. Content Marketing is the process of creating online content as a way to educate your customers and prospects, increase your website traffic, and engage your online community. With that said, when most business owners think “online content” they only think about blog articles and e-mail newsletters. Blog marketing and e-mail marketing are two very effective marketing tactics, but they are only 1 of 4 different types of online content.

Written (typed) Online Content

Content Marketing ideasThe most popular type of online content, which we alluded to above, is written online content. Some examples of written content are blog articles, e-mail newsletters, white papers, and social media updates. The biggest advantage to creating written content is SEO. By creating blog articles you can insert keywords that are relevant to your business. Those articles then become indexed on search engines like Google and Bing. When your target audience is using those keywords to search for information your site will pop up. Here at Catalyst we highly recommend that all small businesses use blogging and other written online content to promote your business.

Video-based Online Content

Video content is another widely used tactic under a Content Marketing strategy. With sites like YouTube and technologies like iPad making it easier (and cheaper) than ever before to produce online videos for your business, small business owners can now compete with the big guys in terms of creating video-based content for your business. Small businesses should can use video marketing to create commercials for your small business, create instructional videos for products and services, produce animated videos with xtranormal.com, etc.

Audio-based Online Content

A third type of online content is audio-based content. Many business owners don’t think about audio-based content when they are creating their online marketing plan. Audio-based online content can come together as:

  • Podcasts
  • Webinars
  • Music or company jingles
  • Online presentations (think PowerPoint with audio)
  • Host a BlogTalkRadio.com Show

Audio-based content is usually a little easier to produce than online video, but still packs a large punch when it comes to achieving your online marketing goals.

Image-based Online Content

Online content that almost every business owner uses, but not usually as part of a defined marketing tactic, is image-based online content. Images are a great way to give customers and prospects a glimpse inside your business. Small Business owners should use imagery on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, etc. to tell a story about their products, services, industry, or even customers.

People love looking at pictures and business owners should capitalize on that by using imagery to share information with their online community. Simply keep a camera out at your business and instruct your employees to take pictures whenever they see a good opportunity. Be sure if you’re taking pictures of customers that you get their permission to use them.

Content Marketing for Your Small Business

As 2012 approaches many of you will begin to craft a new marketing plan for your business. Be sure to include marketing tactics that leverage ALL FOUR types of online content, as each offers distinct benefits to your small business.

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Retail Clothing Boutiques Host Their Own Local Fashion Shows: Post-Event Promotion

Monday, April 26th, 2010

During the last installment of the Hosting Your Own Local Fashion Show Blog Series, we discussed Fashion Show Event Hosting. One thing to keep in mind during the event, which also should be included in your Fashion Show Plan, is post-event marketing opportunities. As you may know from reading this blog, many events and/or promotions give business owners the ability to create marketing campaigns pre-event, during the live event, and post-event. Hosting a local fashion show at your retail clothing boutique definitely gives you the opportunity to market your business before, during, and after the event. In order to successfully promote the event after it’s already occurred, there are a few things that you have to do during the event to ensure you are creating that post-event content.

Some of the things that you can do during the event to ensure that you have great content to promote after the event is finished, are:

Video Record the Fashion Show

Small clothing retailer hosts a fashion showAs we discussed in the last post, you want to be sure to video record the fashion show. This is the ultimate content piece for post-event promotion. This truly let’s those who were unable to attend the live show, see what they missed. It’s the centerpiece of post-event content. This video will be the video that local media outlets use when they write stories on how great the Fashion Show was. Be sure to capture the event from multiple angles if you can. Run secondary cameras to capture B-Roll footage. This way when it comes time to put the final video together, there is plenty of core footage and even more filler footage for use in the video.

Video Record the Pre- & Post-Fashion Show Sales Events

Remember your goal of selling $2,000 worth of clothes during the event? In the last post, we talked about having a Pre-Event Sale and Post-Event Sale on the day of the Fashion Show. These sales are only open to Fashion Show ticket holders, which keeps it intimate and special for attendees. Be sure that you have someone setup with a video camera to capture these Sales Events. The footage can be used as a stand-alone video to show the Pre & Post Event Sale, but footage can also be used as filler in between other videos that you produce from the Fashion Show. This footage will be used as video content that’s pushed out to your customers and followers Post-Fashion Show.

Video Record Interviews from Fashion Show Attendees

Candid footage of fashion show attendees makes for great content. It gives folks who were unable to attend the event a glimpse into what the event was all about. It also lets them hear from real people, many of whom they can relate with. While attendees are enjoying the event, preferably during the Pre-Event and Post-Event Sale, pull a few aside to capture some video. Ask them what they are hoping to see during the Fashion Show, what new styles they really like, how they liked the Fashion Show, what they think of the post-event sale, etc. All of this candid footage will provide you with a ton of excellent content to promote post-event.

Remember to let interviewees know how you plan on using the content – ensure they are OK with it. Even consider having them sign a waiver if you want to truly protect yourself. With that said, the more barriers you create, the less your chances are of getting everyone to participate. It’s really your call based on your comfort level. We usually go the route of, “it’s easier to beg for forgiveness than ask for permission”. Usually nobody complains about anything, but if something were to come up, worst case scenario is that you’re asked to take the video down.

Video Record Interviews from Contest Winners

Prospects love hearing from current customers when they are doing their consumer research. Knowing this, it would be great to grab some interviews from your contest winners and other folks who are loyal customers of your clothing store. As we discussed in the Fashion Show Event Hosting post, prior to the fashion show you can send new clothing to a few lucky local consumers, along with free tickets to attend the fashion show. For many, this would be a really cool thing to have happen to them. Be sure to capitalize on your generosity and creativity by getting as many of the winners on camera as possible, either before or after the event. Remember, these folks will be wearing the clothes they received from you, so that’s great advertising right there. Capturing a video of the winners, who are wearing clothes from you store, is great post-event promotion material. Each winner can talk about his or her experience during the evening, which will hopefully be full of positive reviews of your clothes and your business.

Content Distribution and Promotion

After you capture all of the footage during the event, edit it and make it ready to go live, it’s time to start publishing that video footage to your small business YouTube Channel and to your blog. You can then use the same online social tools that you’ve been using throughout this process, Twitter, Facebook, Yelp, Foursquare, LinkedIn, etc. to promote your new content. Use the content to drive folks to your website or online retail store. You can even get creative with the footage and create new promotions out of it.

Perhaps during one of the video interviews, you hand a customer a $100 gift certificate and instruct that person to hide it in one of the hundreds of pieces of clothing in your store. Then, during post-event promotion, you mention the promotion, show the video clip, and let viewers of the video know that next time they come into the store, they could find a $100 gift certificate in a random piece of clothing. This will certainly help drive traffic to your clothing store post-event – which is the goal! :)

The next installment of the Hosting Your Own Local Fashion Show Blog Series, which will also be the final installment, focuses on Fashion Show Return-On-Investment. Remember to check back to our blog every few days to get access to the new post once it’s up OR simply subscribe to Catalyst Marketers blog to receive email updates when new posts are published.

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Businesses Are Going Hollywood

Thursday, April 8th, 2010

Business is going Hollywood. We caught the first glimpse of this a few years back when Donald Trump created The Apprentice. At that time, TV was the big medium (and still is) for getting video-based content out into the world. Trump was a well-established business person, and somewhat of a celebrity already. He was looked at as unique for his ability to infiltrate Hollywood as nothing more than a businessman.

Now, as time has passed, ONLINE VIDEO is picking up more and more steam. It’s allowing once unknown business leaders to become celebrities. It’s getting to the point that business leaders are becoming as popular as movie stars (well perhaps not yet, but soon, very soon). Chris Brogan is a HUGE business celebrity. He has a big-time following of business professionals and business owners. Same with Mike Michalowitz – The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur. Then you have guys like David “Siteman” Garland who is an big-time up & comer with his own online video show. All three of these business leaders use online video to spread their ideas and educate their readers. Thankful fans hungrily chase the next bit of news from, or about, their favorite business leaders. As their popularity grows within their own niche, their reach expands, and eventually these successful business leaders will hit a tipping point in their celebrity and they will become as Hollywood as Matt Damon and Rachel McAdams. By recognizing this trend, as a small business owner, or heck, a 12 year old middle-schooler for that matter, you have the opportunity to grow your local brand into BIG-TIME, SUPERSTAR BRAND.

Video for my businessThe biggest key to the college student working on a side project, or business owner looking to grow her business, to becoming a star is their ability to use video to communicate their message, just as Hollywood stars use video to communicate their acting talent. Video, more than other content forms, captures personality and creates a deeper connection with the audience. Due to decreasing video production and distribution costs, everyone can become an online video celebrity. Do you have a crazy lead Chef at your restaurant that you’ve always said, this guy could have his own show? Well, give him his own show. Create a YouTube Channel and turn your lead Chef into the next Emeril Lagasse. Are you a quirky fashion designer with passionate ideas about the future of fashion in America? Create your own Future of Fashion Channel on YouTube and start blasting out videos about fashion. Do you walk dogs for a living? Start recording your “Doggy Adventures” and publish those videos to your YouTube Channel. Start educating dog owners about the benefits of exercise for dogs.

What I’m hoping to get across here is that there’s an audience out there for everyone, no matter what business you’re in. Start positioning yourself as the next big thing in your market. Capture your local market first – go Hollywood in your community, and then begin branching out. One great way to help your small business go Hollywood is through the use of online video, which shares many benefits with TV, for a small fraction of the costs.

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Retail Clothing Boutiques Host Their Own Local Fashion Shows: Event Hosting

Wednesday, March 24th, 2010

So, the big day is finally upon you. It’s time to actually pull off this fashion show that you’ve been planning for your small retail clothing store for months now. Remember, if you’ve spent ample time planning your fashion show and you’ve hired a great team to support you, then the event itself will be the easy part. Let’s review some of the things that you have done up to this point that will impact how your event will go.

In the Fashion Show Event Planning post, within this Blog Series, we set a goal of selling $2,000 worth of clothes during the fashion show. This means that during the Planning phase, you have put together a plan on how you’re going to sell the clothes that are being modeled during your show. There are several ways to sell clothes before and after the show:

  • You can have a private store opening for all Fashion Show ticket holders. You can serve hors d’oeuvres in your clothing store while ticket holders shop with other Fashion Show attendees.
  • After the show, you can sell limited items from the show to attendees. You can promote it as an exclusive purchase that other customers won’t be able to make for at least a month. You could even model promo products, that aren’t even going to be for sale, a limited edition of sorts, and make them available only to Fashion Show Attendees. You could even give select clothing pieces away days or weeks later as part of a post-event promotion.

Have a Fashion Show at my clothing storeDuring your Pre-Event Promotion for you local Fashion Show, you were connecting on Twitter with Local Media, as well as, sending local residents free clothes and tickets to the event. Between your promotion and the tickets that you’ve given away to loyal customers, friends, family, and local residents, your Fashion Show should be heavily attended.

One thing you should do in the days leading up to the event is reach out to all of the ticket winners, whether it was local media through your Twitter contest OR local recipients who received your free clothes. Give media members the plan for the evening and ask what they are hoping to get out of the experience. Without asking, try to find out how they plan on covering the event. Hopefully you can get them to write some great reviews about the Fashion Show and your business.

When reaching out to local residents who received the new clothes that you sent out as part of your pre-event promotion, ask them to wear those clothes to the show. They would feel like insiders in a room full of insiders at the Fashion Show by wearing clothes that are actually debuting during the event. Others would see how normal folks look in the clothes and hopefully that leads to sales.

Setup Your Store for the Fashion Show

Have a Fashion Show at my clothing storeKnowing that you’re all setup to accomplish your goals of having a full crowd of loyal customers, local residents, and local media attend the Fashion Show, as well as, a plan in place for selling $2,000 worth of clothes to those folks during the Fashion Show, you can now move your efforts to setting up your store for the Fashion Show. A few things to consider when staging your clothing store for a Fashion Show:

  • You must allow room for Fashion Show attendees to browse your clothing selection during the Pre-Show Private Sale we discussed earlier
  • Put people in charge of shooting video of the show, as well as, taking digital pictures of the models, the clothes, and the attendees. These will be used in Post-Show Promotion on your blog and other social sites.
  • Be sure the food and drinks are good to go
  • Prepare someone to live Tweet the event on your Twitter account. This way your Twitter followers can feel like they are part of the Fashion Show
  • Run through the Auction of the new clothing line that will take place post-event, as part of your goal to sell $2,000 worth of clothes during the Fashion Show.
  • Rehearse the show a few times as if it were the live event. This will allow you to check out the best camera angles, position people where you want them to be during certain times of Fashion Show, and simply work out all of the bugs before going live

After everything has been setup at your clothing store, people have been invited, and rehearsals have taken place, you are ready to host your own local Fashion Show! Take a deep breath and go start greeting your guests.

The next installment of the Hosting Your Own Local Fashion Show blog series focuses on Fashion Show Post-Event Promotion. Remember to check back to our blog every few days to get access to the new post once it’s up OR simply subscribe to Catalyst Marketers blog to receive email updates when new posts are published.

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Retail Clothing Boutiques Host Their Own Local Fashion Shows: Pre-Event Promotion

Wednesday, March 10th, 2010

The next part in the Hosting Your Own Local Fashion Show blog series focuses on Pre-Event Promotion. Building buzz for your boutique fashion show is a HUGE key to your success. Your promotion should start about 6 – 8 weeks out from the actual live date. This will give you ample opportunity to build buzz. When executing on your Pre-Event Promotion, be sure to constantly reference your Local Fashion Show Plan. The plan helps you stay on course, as sometimes social tools can eat up more of your time than you’d like. Using online social tools requires a bit of discipline, which is a topic for another day.

Montgomery County, PA Fashion ShowBeing able to pull off an event like hosting your own local boutique fashion show is a big feat for all business owners, both large and small. With that said, a few years ago, it was almost impossible to host your own successful Fashion Show as a small business. The main reason being costs. Tools for pulling off a fashion show have been around for a while, but those tools were just so much more expensive than tools today. Free online social tools like Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, Google Local, and many others can help clothing boutique owners create a ton of buzz around their local Fashion Show. You can host a contest to give away free tickets to the community. You can offer discounts to live attendees on anything they purchase that night. Really, the opportunities are limitless if you get creative.

Here are a few other ideas that might help you get started promoting your boutique fashion show:

  • Setup a Twitter target list of local media outlets and start building relationships with those folks. Then when it comes time to promote your Fashion Show, be sure to let them in on this creative endeavor. Hopefully you get some pub on their local news websites
  • Package up a few new clothing pieces that you plan to unveil at the show and start sending them to random local residents with an invitation to attend the live event
  • Shoot a video of someone describing the event and the new fashion line. Post it to YouTube to help explain what attendees can expect
  • Create a Flickr Slide Show with pictures of some of the new fashion items that will be revealed – giving people a sneak peak at only some items
  • Write a blog post or 3 about the event and promote it through your social networks

Again, all it takes to pull off pre-event promotion is a little creativity, a plan, and an understanding of how to best use the free online social tools to your advantage. Now, more than any other time in history, small business owners can take control of their marketing efforts and really drive sales for their small business. Running a Local Fashion Show is a really creative way to promote your small clothing boutique. Now, through free online social tools, you have the ability to market your business like a Fortune 500 company.

The next installment of the Hosting Your Own Local Fashion Show blog series focuses on a href=”hhttp://www.catalystmarketers.com/fashion-show-event-hosting/” title=”Host a fashion show”>Fashion Show Event Hosting. Remember to check back to our blog every few days to get access to the new post once it’s up OR simply subscribe to Catalyst Marketers blog to receive email updates when new posts are published.

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Retail Clothing Boutiques Host Their Own Local Fashion Shows: Event Planning

Wednesday, February 24th, 2010

Welcome to the Event Planning portion of our blog series on Hosting Your Own Local Fashion Show. In our first post, we gave an overview and provided the benefits of hosting your own fashion show for your retail clothing store. If you’re interested in hosting a local fashion show for your small retail clothing boutique, definitely check out this blog series.

No matter what you’re doing when it comes to marketing, planning, IMO, is the MOST critical piece. As always, it’s recommended that you spend two-thirds of your time & energy planning the event, with one-third being left for everything else. Having a solid plan will allow you the greatest opportunity to be successful in each step that follows. During the planning process, determine how you want to handle each step of the Fashion Show process:

  • Pre-Event Promotion
  • Event Execution
  • Post-Event Promotion
  • Determining Return-On-Investment

Start out by determining what your goals for the Fashion Show are. Perhaps you want to build awareness & publicity for your retail clothing boutique and/or sell $2,000 worth of clothes during the fashion show. Setting your goals during the Planning process will help you calculate the Return-On-Investment from the Fashion Show. Once you have your goals in place, now determine how you will go about achieving them.

Figure out how you will build buzz within your local community. You can build publicity and awareness by promoting the event through online social tools, as well as, through in-store ads/fliers. You can host a live event and invite select customers, friends, family, media, and other local business owners. Video recording the event will be imperative, so that you can distribute it online – perhaps through YouTube or Viddler, in order to capture a larger audience. You can use the same online social tools to promote the fashion show post-event, that used to promote it pre-event.

Finally, pull in a great team to help you pull this off and determine how you’ll handle any of those scary situations that you’ve undoubtedly conjured up in your mind since you decided to go for it. Everyone has a few fears when doing something out of their comfort zone. In order to ease those fears a bit, determine what scares you the most, and figure out a plan for how you’ll handle the situation if it comes up. 90% of the time, those fears never come to fruition, BUT in the rare case that something does occur, you’ll have a plan on how to handle it.

Having a solid plan is the foundation for a successful event. Now that you have a solid plan in place for your local fashion show, you can move on to the next step in the process.

Stay tuned for the next part of the Host Your Own Local Fashion Show Series. We will discuss Pre-Event Promotion for Fashion Shows. With free online social tools at your disposal, marketing an event like this around your local community will be a breeze.

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Retail Clothing Boutiques Host Their Own Local Fashion Shows by Using Online Social Tools

Tuesday, February 16th, 2010

Do you own or operate a small retail clothing business? If so, do you find it difficult to compete with some of the larger retail chains out there? Do you ever find yourself watching those celebrity-filled fashion shows on TV saying, “our clothes are so much nicer than that”. If that’s the case, then perhaps you should consider hosting your own local fashion show for your retail clothing boutique.

Hosting a local fashion show for your small retail clothing store could be hugely beneficial to your business. It’s a creative way to spend your marketing dollars. Here are a few positives that your clothing store can get out of running an event like this:

  • The fashion show would generate you a ton of brand awareness through local media outlets, blogs, etc.
  • You can easily afford to promote it, and run it, by using free online social tools
  • The audience can be made up of top customers, local media, etc. You can create some great promotions around getting tickets for the live event.
  • During the show you can sell merchandise to live audience members
  • Before, during, and after the event you can use the story to drive new fans, follows, blog readers, etc. for your small business
  • The fashion show would create a lot of word-of-mouth buzz around your community and hopefully drive new customers to your retail clothing store

Bucks County, PA Fashion ShowThere are probably even more benefits to running an event like this, but you only have so much time to read this post and I only have so much time to write it…The key for small business owners to pulling this off is that the tools to do so are now available to you at a price you can afford. Online social tools can help you promote the event, share the event with the world, and converse with fans post-event. I’d imagine that you could run your own local fashion show for less than $1,000 if you get creative. Tools like YouTube and Viddler allow you to post a video from the show online. Facebook, Twitter, Yelp and your company blog will allow you to promote the event both before, during, and after. Your fashion show may be so cutting edge for your local community that it gets picked up by local news stations, which will add some great PR for you and your small retail clothing shop.

Hosting your own local fashion show for your retail clothing boutique can seem like a daunting challenge for most time-strapped business owners. With that said, if it’s something that you believe can really make a positive impact on your business, then go for it. Before getting started, break the event down into more manageable pieces. Here are the 5 main steps we’d carve out for executing a highly successful local fashion show.

  1. Local Fashion Show: Event Planning
  2. Local Fashion Show: Pre-Event Promotion
  3. Local Fashion Show: Event Hosting
  4. a href=”http://www.catalystmarketers.com/fashion-show-post-event-promotion/trackback/” title=”Post Event Promotion”>Local Fashion Show: Post-Event Promotion
  5. Local Fashion Show: Return-On-Investment

Over the next week, to two weeks, we’ll be breaking each one of these components down. The goal being to provide our readers with a clear framework on how to execute an event of this magnitude for your small business, through the use of online social tools.

Consider subscribing to the Catalyst Marketers blog to receive the next part in the Host Your Own Local Fashion Show Series.

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