If only there were more hours in a day. For most marketers, this is something we find ourselves asking all too often.
Despite our earnest desire to check off more on our to-do lists, much of our daily schedule is littered with interruptions. In fact, the average office worker becomes distracted every three minutes.
Whether it's social media, email, or that conversation two desks down, even the most diligent work can struggle to maintain focus. But instead of striving to shut out the distractions, too many resort to multitasking -- a temptation that can reduce productivity by up to 40%.
In our new guide, we'll dive into the cause and effect of workplace procrastination and provide practical steps to accomplish more in your day. Additionally, you will learn:
Best practices for taking breaks while you work
How to get the most out of working from home
What to eat to get more done in a day
How to turn productivity goals into long-term habits
Personal tips to stay focused from HubSpot employees
Taking a great idea and turning it into a real, functioning, successful business requires quite a bit of work, sweat, and coffee.
There are documents to be signed, prospects to be called, emails to be sent, and tweets to be posted. In other words, there's never a shortage of tasks on your plate on any given day.
Sure, you could hire a bunch of extra hands, but if you're not in a financial position to onboard new talent right away, then that wouldn't make good business sense, now would it?
Trouble is, while keeping costs down is a critical piece of the puzzle, it can make finding the right tools to simplify your day-to-day responsibilities a little challenging.
That's why we've come up with a list of must-have tools for anyone running a business ... and they're all free. From heat mapping software to help inform your website design to a project management tool to keep your team on track, you won't know how you did your job without them.
Ever want to send an email on a Friday but don't want it to get lost in the recipient's mailbox over the weekend? With Boomerang for Gmail, you can write an email now and schedule it to be sent at a time that's more convenient.
But that's not all. Boomerang boasts a ton of other features designed to make your life easier. For example, if your inbox is feeling a little unruly, you can pick and choose which emails you'd like to temporarily archive until you need them. Simply pick the time and date that you'd like it to reappear, and it'll be there. Magical.
Keeping your team on the same page -- whether you're working remotely or side-by-side -- isn't always easy. With new ideas, changing deadlines, and last-minute adjustments happening through out the course of a day, you need a place to keep everything unified. That's where Trello comes in.
At a glance, Trello makes it easy for users to visualize what tasks are on their plate, what their team members are currently working on, and what's already been completed. Functioning like a virtual bulletin board, the tool offers boards and cards to help you and your team organize a project, or just keep tabs on your day-to-day work.
With cards, users can upload file attachments, add comments, create checklists, assign due dates, and so much more. And whenever a change is made to a card, Trello's notification system can send an update to the members of the board to keep everyone in the know.
Ah, paperwork. One of the worst timesucks in your day.
Luckily, there is a tool to help free up some of that time. Rather than spending your day tracking down the right people to sign the right documents, HelloSign makes it easy for users to sign documents and request esignatures from up to 20 different people. And once the document is completed, everyone that signed will get a copy delivered straight to their inbox to keep for their records.
Worried about security? You don't have to be. HelloSign uses SSL encryption during file transfers to keep your documents safe. (Want to learn more about SSL? Check out this article from my colleague, Jeffrey.)
To make your life even easier, HelloSign integrates with many of the apps you're already using -- Gmail, Google Apps, Dropbox, Evernote, etc. This means you can sign legally binding documents in 30 seconds or less, without leaving your Gmail inbox.
In sales, speed matters. Think about it: In the time that your salespeople spend digging through their inbox for bit of information about a prospect, they could be losing a sale to competitor.
HubSpot CRM enables sales teams to work more efficiently by providing reps with a detailed history of their interactions with a prospect. Unlike other systems, HubSpot CRM is both intuitive and automatic, making it easy for users to log emails, record calls, and manage their data. This type of easy access to touch points helps to ensure that reps aren't sending repeat emails or mismanaging their time with prospects that aren't interested.
Meetings, emails, and unexpected desk visitors can sometimes make it difficult to actually get work done during the day. Well, with an internal team communication tool like Slack, your team can collaborate, share files, give feedback, and provide quick solutions all using real-time messaging.
According to Slack's website, teams using its software find a 25.1% decrease in meetings and a 48.6% reduction in internal email, resulting in a 32% increase in team productivity.
Slack also offers fully native apps for iOS and Android, making it easy for you to pick up where you left off after you leave your desk.
LeadIn is a free WordPress plugin designed by our team here at HubSpot. Built to help you understand your website visitors better, this tool makes it easy to find out not only who is on your website, but also what they're doing.
With LeadIn, users automatically get insights into everyone who fills out a form on their website. From pages they've visited to social networks that they're on, these details can help you make more strategic marketing moves.
LeadIn integrates with email software like MailChimp, Constant Contact, and Campaign Monitor, so you can push the contacts who fill out a form on you site straight into an email list.
Dropbox provides businesses with an easy way to share and store photos, videos, documents, spreadsheets, and other files, using both desktop and mobile devices. Eliminating the need for flash drives, Dropbox makes it easy for users to access the information where they need to, when they need to.
In terms of collaboration, the tool aims to simplify the way teams collaborate and share files -- proving to be especially useful for teams in which some members telecommute. Users can even add comments to shared files, which saves time and eliminates the need for another email in your inbox.
Running a business requires a lot of hands. Trouble is, your new business budget might not stretch enough to cover new talent. In other words, you've got to work with what you've got.
Rather than allowing routine tasks to eat up all your precious time, try IFTTT. Short for "if this, than that," IFTTT is a productivity tool that employs "recipes" to automate your important online processes. (Essentially, it's like autopilot for your day-to-day tasks.)
Recipes link together some of your favorite cloud-based services, and can trigger a specific action based on particular events. To clarify, here are a couple examples:
If an email is starred in Gmail, then save that email (and its first attachment) to Evernote.
If you create a new link post on Facebook, then post a tweet with the same link on Twitter.
The health of your business often has a lot to do with how visitors interact and respond to your website. But how can you optimize for the user when you don't know what the user wants?
With Hotjar, you can leverage heat mapping technology to turn up a visual representation of you website visitor's clicks, taps, and scrolling behavior. These behaviors serve as strong indicators of what your visitors are looking for and where they're getting stuck.
By identifying these opportunities for conversion optimization and improvement, you can then make iterations to your website design and copy in an effort to streamline the user experience.
Looking for more ideas on how you can use the insights you gather using Hotjar to strengthen your website? Here are a few suggestions from its website:
Discover how visitors react to longer or shorter pages.
Overhaul forms to generate more leads.
Remove or rethink ignored content.
Reveal anxieties about trust or confusing policies.
Canva is an easy-to-use tool that allows both designers and non-designers to create designs and documents without a ton of technical knowledge.
Thanks to features like the drag-and-drop functionality, free icons and shapes, collections of fonts, and helpful templates, users are equipped with everything they need to pull off quality designs for presentations, social media, reports, and even business cards.
Canva even offers a Design School, where users can go to learn more about design 101, branding, color theory, design trends, typography, and much more.
Ever find yourself on the train or at a red light when a great idea strikes? With Evernote, you can catalog your thoughts on any device to ensure that you don't forget to execute on it. And because Evernote syncs across all of your devices, it's easy to jot down an idea when it hits, and then run with it when you get to your desk the next morning.
The free online workspace provides users with a platform for writing, collecting images and snippets from around the web, and communicating, collaborating, and sharing with colleagues.
Thanks to the tool's screen-friendly layout, you can even transform your notes into a quick presentation for an impromptu meeting on your latest project.
Manager.io makes free accounting software for small businesses. Noteworthy features include: General ledgers, cash management, bank reconciliation, expense claims, accounts receivable, accounts payable, estimates and quotes, purchase orders, billing and invoicing, and so much more.
The folks at Manager.io place a heavy emphasis on design, and that's highlighted through the functionality of the tool. Unlike traditional accounting software, Manager.io doesn't require users to enter opening balances or configure tax variables before they can issue an invoice or record a payment. In fact, getting started requires very few configurations, so you get straight to what's important: your accounting needs.
According to its website, "Google Analytics' solutions can help you turn customer insights into action for your business."
For small businesses, Google Analytics' free services aim to simplify the way users view and improve the performance of their websites. Not only does the solution provide you with the means necessary to report on your website's progress each month, but these insights can also help you better understand your visitors so that you can create a marketing experience that keeps bringing them back.
If you're looking to improve your analytical skills, Google offers expert lessons, tests, and community forums, all available in Analytics Academy.
What free tools do you use to run your business? Share your favorite in the comments section below.
Whenever I'm watching a movie and I see a case of really obvious product placement, I can't help but roll my eyes.
But product placement is everywhere, from the famous Mini Cooper car chase in the 2003 film The Italian Job to the cans of Mountain Dew rewarded to the winning team on CBS's television series, Survivor.
And while some instances of product placement are pretty subtle and tasteful, others are so obvious they're groan-worthy.
So how does product placement work? How much does it cost? And what are the best examples of product placement in movies, television shows, and music videos? Let's dive in.
Why Is Product Placement a Thing?
While many people think of movies when they think product placement, television actually accounts foralmost 71.4% of all paid placements -- and about 75% of all broadcast-network shows feature placements of some kind. Video games and pop music are other popular industries for product shout-outs.
And it's all about context. In the popular 1955 American film Rebels Without a Cause, James Dean used an Ace Comb -- and suddenly every cool teenage boy had to have one, resulting in a big increase in sales. Why? Because the comb was part of a storyline and an image that boys at the time could easily buy into.
According to a Priceonomics analysis, products placed into storylines can be a lot more successful for brands than traditional advertisements, like TV ads. It's easier to sell a viewer on the value of a product if they're emotionally invested in the storyline in which it's presented, rather than a viewer who's watching an ad totally out of context. Plus, it's far too easy to skip ads and zone out during ads nowadays, anyway.
And it turns out product placements pretty cost-efficient in comparison to advertisements.
How Much Does It Cost?
Product integration into multiple episodes of primetime television series can cost a brand $3–10 million (with full-series deals exceeding $50 million). As for integrations into movies? You're looking at tens of millions of dollars. However, those figures are cheap compared to the 30-second ad spots on television -- especially since people can tune out or skip the ads.
"A typical TV spot will cost $350,000 on average to shoot, and tens of millions to run for a few small flights -- most of which will be skipped or will fail to register for one reason or another," Priceonomics reported.
The appearance of name brands in productions tend to beg the question: How much did [brand name] have to pay for that? You might be surprised to learn that, while some brands pay between hundreds of thousands and several million dollars, many placements are actually done for free. Turns out that movie and film and music producers love forming alliances with brands and are eager to incorporate them into productions.
For example, Hershey Foods didn't pay anyone in the movie industry to have Reese's Pieces used in the iconic film E.T. Instead, it agreed to promote E.T. with $1 million worth of advertising in exchange for the product placement in the movie. Worth it? You betcha: Hershey's profit increased by 65% during the movie's run.
Clearly, the cost and logistics of each product placement varies on a case-by-case basis. Let's take a look at some of the most obvious -- and then least obvious -- product placements in film, television, video games, and music.
13 Unforgettable Examples of Product Placements in Movies, TV & Music Videos
1) Pizza Hut, Doritos, Reebok, Nuprin & Pepsi in Wayne's World (1992)
One of the most ridiculously obvious instances of product placement in film is also one of my favorites. It's that scene in Wayne's World that makes fun of product placements, while simultaneously promoting products from Pizza Hut, Doritos, Reebok, Nuprin, and Pepsi.
At one point in the scene, Garth -- who is dressed head-to-toe in Reebok -- shakes his head and says, "It's like, people only do things because they get paid, and that's just really sad." It's laugh-out-loud funny.
2) Reese's Pieces in E.T. The Extra Terrestrial (1982)
The famous appearance of Reese's Pieces in E.T. bears repeating. Hershey didn't pay a dime to the folks behind the scenes at E.T. to have their candy placed prominently in the movie, but they did strike a deal to spend $1 million on advertising promoting the movie in exchange for that product placement.
Originally, Steven Spielberg wanted M&Ms in the movie, but Mars reportedly turned him down because Universal Studios was unwilling to show them the final script before they started filming. They missed out: Hershey ended up seeing a 65% profit increase as a result during the movie's run.
3) Dr. Pepper in 90210 (2008)
Dr. Pepper made several appearances in the CW soap opera 90210, and the writers didn't shortchange the soda company with their script one bit. In one episode, two of the characters went on a road trip and, at one point, had to pull over at a rest stop so one of them could use the bathroom. "Maybe if you stopped drinking so much Dr. Pepper!" said one. The other's reply? "We're on a road trip! Drinking Dr. Pepper is practically a requirement."
Here's a clip from another placement of Dr. Pepper in the same episode:
4) Ford Fusion in New Girl (2012)
I'll never forget shameless plug for Ford Fusion in an episode of the American sitcom New Girl. In the episode, three friends pile into their friend's car. One of them exclaims, "Loving the new Ford Fusion!" Then, in a conversation that you'd be hard-pressed to witness in any real life situation, the friends proceeded to talk about how roomy the car is -- "You could open a hat store in here!" -- and how cool the gas mileage efficiency coaching system is.
That wasn't the only time the TV show featured Ford Fusion, either. In another episode, the main character spends two full minutes discussing the car's features while struggling to model at a car show.
5) Coca Cola, Miracle Whip, Polaroid, Virgin Mobile & More in Lady Gaga's Music Video, "Telephone" (2010)
“Your favorite songs and music videos are becoming advertisements," wrote Tom Barnes for Music.Mic -- and some are more obvious than others. Lady Gaga's 9-minute music video Telephonefeaturing Beyoncé is littered with product placements, including Coca Cola, Miracle Whip, Polaroid, Virgin Mobile, Hewlett Packard, and the Plenty of Fish dating website.
But, according to AdAge, Gaga's manager claims only a handful of these placements were paid. For example, the scene where Gaga curls her hair using Diet Coke cans was a nod to her mother, who did exactly that during the 1970s.
The James Bond movies have always been a smorgasbord of product placements, from remote-controlled BMWs and Omega watches to elaborate vacation destinations. But Heineken tops the list: Their U.S. division paid a reported $45 million for a product placement in the 2012 film Skyfall. And for fans of the series that are used to hearing the character order his signature drink -- martini (shaken, not stirred) -- the in-movie placement was pretty obvious. In fact, it was almost alarming to hear Bond turn down his signature drink for a bottle of Heineken.
The deal also included a 30-second commercial starring Daniel Craig as James Bond, a branded web game featuring Craig and his female co-star, Bérénice Marlohe.
Heineken has a 15-year, multi-picture deal with the producers of James Bond movies, which is one of the longest running (and most expensive) in history. Heineken is set to make an appearance in the 2015 film Spectre.
7) BMW Z3 in GoldenEye (1995)
We couldn't mention product placement and James Bond without a nod toward the fictional spy's love of BMWs. He drove Aston Martins in Bond movies until 1995's GoldenEye, when he switched it out for the BMW Z3 Roadster.
"In retrospect, BMW’s placement of the Z3 into Goldeneye seems quite risky," wrote the folks at Priceonomics. "Had the movie been pushed back half a year (not an uncommon practice in Hollywood), BMW might have been stuck advertising its previous year’s model in a new movie." BMW paid $3 million for the placement -- but then made $240 million in advance sales alone.
The car chase scene that would become famous featured three BMW Mini Coopers in three different colors. The original 1969 film featured an old model of Mini Cooper, so when the film's producers asked BMW if they could use the newer model for the remake, they agreed -- and provided more than 30 cars for use in the film. And it worked: BMW saw a 22% increase in sales in the year the film was released over the previous year.
9) Ray-Ban in Risky Business (1983)
Given the Ray-Ban Wayfarer's popularity over the past several decades, it's hard to believe the sunglasses manufacturer considered canceling the line at one time. Their survival -- and huge popularity -- is thanks to the 1983 film Risky Business, for which the brand attributes the sale of over 360,000 pairs of Wayfarers.
Three years later, the producers of another Tom Cruise movie partnered with Ray-Ban, this time their Aviator line for 1986's Top Gun. As a result of the movie, sales of aviator sunglasses increased by 40%.
10) Volvo in Swedish House Mafia's Music Video, "Leave The World Behind"
ShortList calls it "not really a video, more a full-scale, four-minute Volvo commercial" -- although I beg to differ. The car only shows up a handful of times in the Swedish House Mafia music video, and each appearance is only a second or two long, and they're pretty tasteful. Not to mention, the music video is about leaving ... they were going to have to include shots of some car in there. Might as well be one produced by their home country.
Nike's Air Jordan's have shown up in several movies and TV shows over the past several decades, especially in the 1990s. In the 2013 film White House Down, the U.S. President (played by actor Jamie Foxx) engages in hand-to-hand combat with a terrorist. At one point, the terrorist grabs his feet, prompting him to yell out, "Get your hands off my Jordan's!"
12) Marlboro, Coca-Cola & KFC in Superman (1980)
Many of the product placements in the 1980 version of the film Superman were much more subtle. Check out the fight scene in the video clip below, and see if you can spot the least obvious placement of all: the KFC box on the car dashboard.
The 2013 version of the movie, called Man of Steel, ended up earning $160 million from promotional tie-ins with brands like Sears and Warby Parker. These tie-ins aren't necessarily product placements themselves, though: For example, Warby Parker is created Clark Kent-inspired glasses; Gillette produced a video series on how Superman shaves, and Walmart offered patrons an exclusive movie screening.
13) Manolo Blahnik in Sex and the City
Carrie Bradshaw's obsession with Manolo Blahnik's shoes helped the Spanish designer become a household name. His shoes pop up in multiple TV episodes (16 times in 94 episodes, to be exact) and a pair of Manolos that were custom-designed for the film make a star appearance in the The Sex and the City Movie as the prop used by Carrie's boyfriend to propose to her in place of a diamond ring.
While these product placements are certainly obvious ones, they don't actually come across as obnoxious. Why? Because brands are a part of these girls' fashion-forward, New York City lifestyle. Jimmy Choo was another favorite of hers.
And Sarah Jessica Parker, who plays Carrie and was the producer for Sex and the City: The Movie, said she wouldn't have been able to finance and market the film without product partnerships. Sometimes these partnerships involved product placements, but most of the time, it was simply businesses spending heavily to promote their ties to the movie, according to Reuters.
There are a lot -- I mean a lot -- of examples of product placement out there. Which are your favorites? Which examples from this list do you think are tasteful -- and which do you think aren't so tasteful? Share your thoughts with us in the comments.
Ever find yourself with a ton of ideas that you don't know what to do with? You can picture what you want to do in your head, but you don't have the technical skills to actually execute on them.
You need a developer -- someone with the expertise required to take all of your grand plans and actually turn them into something. Unfortunately, you don't even know where to begin with coding, never mind finding a talented developer.
For non-techies, hiring top tech talent can be pretty intimidating. What skills should you look for? How much should you pay them? What are their needs?
To help you navigate this process a little better, check out the infographic below from the folks at Modis. They've put together a step-by-step guide designed to help you find the perfect tech match for your business. (And for more tips on working with developers, check out this post.)
What are your best tips for hiring the right tech talent? Let us know in the comment section below.
‘Keeping up with the Joneses’ has long been an idiom relating to the need to keep up with the latest and greatest gadgets, trends, innovations and benchmarks (mainly so as not to be shown up by your trendy neighbours). For marketing professionals, ‘the Joneses’ are everyone and everything from your customers, to your industry, to your competitors, to the latest developments in the marketing and media industries. What’s more, the lightning-fast evolution of technology and the always-changing behaviour of modern consumers make keeping up with the Joneses a pretty tall order for the average marketer.
Luckily, there’s more than one way to make sure you’re not falling behind your competitors or losing touch with your customers. Here are eight ways marketers can keep up with the proverbial Joneses:
1) Carry Out Customer Research
Keeping up with the times means making sure you understand what your clients really want from your brand; as well as what their current perceptions are. Good old customer research is an important part of making sure you stay educated on the subject. The research methods that are likely to be most effective will depend on your particular industry, but there are a whole host of options to choose from:
Without even having to leave your desk, simple email surveys are a good place to start. An email survey can be short and simple – simply asking customers to rate their last service transaction, for example – or take the form of a detailed questionnaire aimed at unearthing customer insights into the state of the industry.
Online polls likewise provide an easy way to gather customer data without setting foot outside of your office. Polls can be hosted on your website or on a customer extranet and allow you to gain quick insights into customer opinion and sentiment. Social monitoring – listening in on conversations relating to your brand, products and industry on social media networks – can likewise be a goldmine of useful insight and data.
Alternatively, you could go the route of focus groups, which involve gathering a targeted group of customers or potential customers and asking them a set of questions in a group setting. The interesting thing about focus groups is that you’re able to see not only how each group member answers each question, but also how members engage with and differ from each other.
2) Read... All the Time
If you’re a marketer and you’re not a voracious reader already, you better get ready to become one. The best way to stay abreast of the latest marketing trends and developments is to regularly scour the media for relevant content. Personally, I’m a devout reader of blogs like theMoz Blog,theContent Marketing Institute blog and theKissmetrics blog. I also enjoy news websites likeeMarketer,Business Insider,Mashableand research papers put out by institutions likeGartnerandForrester.
To save time, pinpoint a few really informative, on-trend websites as your go-to sources and open an account with a news aggregator likeFeedly.Another good option is to follow relevant social media accounts and use HubSpot’s Social Inbox to aggregate your updates.
3) Pick your Battles, Outsource the Rest
For an in-house marketer, it can be tricky to stay on top of the latest developments in every corner. Sometimes, the smart move is to ease the pressure by outsourcing key elements of your digital marketing strategy to an agency.Outsourcing your digital marketing– or just parts of it – to an agency means you don’t have to worry about missinga beat on the latest developments in marketing technology. It’s the agency’s job to let you know which tech advancements are worth taking notice of and how best to implement them.
The benefits of outsourcing are obvious: you don’t break a sweat while a specialist team does all the hard work for you. The downside? An external party may never understand the industry you’re in or the clients you serve as well as someone within your business.
4) Leverage Sales Team Insights
Your sales team is a source of amazing insight – so make use of them. Remember, they’re at the coalface of your company. They know exactly who they’re competing against, why they’re winning or losing deals and what your customers really think. They’re industry experts. The idea behind the ‘smarketing’ movement is that when sales and marketing teams work together, aiming for the same set of goals, the entire process becomes more streamlined and effective. The sentiment shouldn’t end there, however; marketing and sales teams should collaborate and brainstorm around campaigns, products and industry trends too.
5) Share the Burden
Attempting to single-handedly track all the elements of your marketing equates to taking on a huge amount of work. Make the task more manageable by assigning specific team members to specific functions. For example, the team member assigned to demand generation just needs to keep up with trends and information around demand generation. A team member in charge of product development could manage your products, track developments in competitors’ products and deal with the implementation of new features your customers ask for. Your assigned marketing technologist would keep up to date with new marketing technology and help the team implement it.
6) Merge, Acquire and Conquer
Many large companies find innovation difficult. When you take into consideration the red tape and approval processes that need to be navigated before a single Tweet can be posted, for example, it’s not hard to understand why big companies tend to be slow-moving. The slow corporate machine often results in these brands becoming outdated and losing relevance in the minds of their consumers. In the meantime, start-ups with little capital start grabbing market share with their cool products and on-point evolved messaging. That’s why the Mergers and Acquisitions teams in big corporate companies are always on the look-out for these smaller, ‘cool’ companies because one way to keep up with the Joneses is to acquire them.
It’s worth noting that even highly innovative companies know that it’s a smart move to acquire smaller, way-ahead-of-the-curve companies, as was evidenced by Apple’s acquisition of Beats Music and Beats Electronics for $3 billion in August last year.
7) Adopt an Agile Approach to Marketing
In the past, marketers could develop their annual marketing plan in the final quarter of the year, then spend the rest of the year activating it. These days, industry trends and consumer behaviour change far too quickly for this kind of approach to work. In the world of software development, the agile methodology means that smaller, bite-sized chunks of code are developed and deployed so that solutions are delivered incrementally, tested along the way and even change direction as they are delivered.
This approach can – and should – be applied to modern marketing. On the agile model, your annual marketing plan is more of a guideline than a set-in-stone plan. As you deploy each strategy and action, test how the market responds to it and adapt it as you go. This way, you’re always poised to tweak your marketing strategy according to the ongoing evolution of your industry, competitors and customers.
8) Stay True to Your Mission
Keeping up with the latest marketing trends and developments is important if you hope to stay relevant to your ever-evolving customers. However, that doesn’t mean you need to force your brand or product into whichever mould is hot right now. Inhis keynote speechat INBOUND 2015, Seth Godin spoke about standing by your positioning and differentiation. Godin says that too many brands shave off their edges to appeal to a larger market, thereby alienating their primary market in the process. Sometimes – despite what everyone else in the industry might be saying and doing – it pays to stick with your original idea.
It might be a time-consuming (and sometimes mind-boggling) task, but keeping up with the latest developments in marketing technology, industry norms and consumer trends is non-negotiable. Today’s well-informed and web-savvy consumers expect nothing less.
One of the wisest things I've ever read about product marketing came from the writer of a children's book.
"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea," said Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, creator ofThe Little Prince.
The goal in crafting a perfect product video is not far off. If you want your video to resonate, it should be about more than just the product. It should be about the problem, the solution, the experience, and the larger vision of what you're trying to build.
Considering the right video can put a product on the map for the first time or reinvigorate a company that has long been stale, it's important that marketers have a strong grasp on this. So to inspire your own efforts, we've collected a list of impressive product videos for marketing a product or new release.
7 Examples of Promotional Videos That Make You Want to Buy
1) Blendtec: Will it Blend?
I'm digging into the archives for this one, but in the world of videos that add life to a product, few have done it better than Blendtec. The company's CEO, Tom Dickson, became a YouTube icon back in 2006 with the introduction of his Will it Blend? series.
Since then, Blendtec has expanded the tremendous success of these videos to other channels, enabling viewers to suggest things to blend on Facebook. The company even has its own Wikipedia page dedicated to the series.
The success of this video comes down to two things: a clear, unwavering message and a company with a personality. In seven years, the series has never changed. The point of each video and the underpinning of the product positioning is essentially, "Why yes, it will blend."
For years, we've been watching this product blend everything from glow sticks to an iPhone. The videos are minimally expensive, product-focused, and garner millions of views. In a recent interview, Dickson explained the history and success of the video series:
"'Will it Blend?' was developed accidentally by a new marketing director hired in 2006. I have always been one to try to break my blenders to find their fail points and determine how I can improve them. George, the new marketing director, discovered some of the wacky things I was doing to my blenders ... With a $50 budget, George bought a Happy Meal, a rotisserie chicken, Coke cans, golf balls, and a few other items, and they made five videos. Six days later, we had six million views on YouTube. Six years, 120-plus videos, almost 200 million views later, 'Will it Blend?' has been named as the number one viral marketing campaign of all time [by Ad Age]."
Here's Tom blending a Facebook request: Justin Bieber. The video earned 2.8 million views (and counting) on YouTube.
2) Dollar Shave Club: Our Blades are Great
Dollar Shave Club also made waves with their first product video. I'll warn you now: they're not shy with the F-bombs or referring to "your handsome-ass grandfather," so you may want to throw in the headphones before pressing play. Having said that, what's singular about this product launch video is how well the company knows its audience and the problem it's trying to solve.
Dollar Shave Club was trying to crack into a demographic of young, professional men who habitually purchase big-brand razors at local stores. The problem they attempt to highlight is the absurdly high cost of store-bought razor cartridges. Thus, the company needed an absurdist, well-targeted product launch video to match.
CEO Michael Dubin, who studied improv with the Upright Citizens Brigade, wrote the spot himself and hired a comedian friend, Lucia Aniello, to produce the video. According to reports on Quora, the video cost approximately $4,500 -- and yet, it got more than 11 million views and coverage on countless media outlets.
3) Purple Feather: The Power of Words
In tight marketing budgets, professional copywriting services are often the first to be cut. Instead of hiring professional copywriters, companies opt to take on the writing themselves, figuring it's not all that different from other writing they do. They assume the words they choose won't make much of a difference one way or the other. Based in Glasgow, Purple Feather is a copywriting agency that set out to prove that assumption wrong.
Words matter. In fact, they can change everything. Purple Feather made that point exceptionally clear in this powerful video:
4) Google Chrome: Jess Time
The best product videos focus not on the product itself, but on the stories of the people who use it.
Technology writer and NYU Professor Clay Shirky has a great chapter in his first book about the pervasiveness of communications tools in our lives. In it, he explains that technology doesn't truly get interesting until it becomes so ingrained in our lives it turns invisible. No product video shows this "invisibility" of really good products better than Google's "The Web is What You Make It" series.
The video below demonstrates how seamlessly Google and all of its products have melded into our lives and become a part of how we interact. It's a video about experience, not software, and that is arguably what the company truly creates.
5) Apple: The Only Thing That's Changed
Launch videos like the Dollar Shave Club video above have a bit of an advantage when it comes to resonating with an audience. They represent a brand new company, product, or idea. But what if your company has been around for a long time? What if the announcement you're making is really more of a set of enhancements to an existing product than a brand new launch?
This year, Apple tackled that challenge head-on with the following video. This video takes a collection of seemingly small enhancements and strings them together in a way that underscores just how advanced the total new functionality is. Take a look:
6) Google: Google, Evolved
This year Google introduced a new logo for the company and a new parent company, Alphabet. It was the perfect moment for retrospection. So the company took to video to show not only how much Google's products have evolved, but how much progress those products have enabled in the world around them.
The brilliance of this video is that it uses others to tell the story. Whereas some companies may have pointed the camera at their own designers and developers (looking at you, Apple), Google put the focus on the users, media, and cultural leaders that have adopted and promoted the products along the way. The resulting video plays more like a historical chapter than a commercial.
7) InVision: Design Disruptors
I want to end this list with a bit of an anomaly, because it pushes at the boundaries of what can be considered a product video and, as such, opens up all sorts of opportunities.
InVision, a prototyping, collaboration, and workflow platform wants to empower designers -- their primary users. Much of their content strategy is bent on this mission. This year, InVision will launch a documentary on the role of design in the modern business.
Design Disruptors looks at how 15 top businesses prioritize design in their products and overall user experience. Unlike traditional product videos, Design Disruptors will run in theaters and on Netflix. And unlike traditional product videos, Design Disruptors never actually promotes the product. The goal is bigger than the product.
"We're trying to bring attention to the increased importance of design in a company's success," explains David Malpass, InVision's vice president of marketing. "A lot of our work is based on doing things that'll create a positive effect on the design community and that will elevate the role of the designer within their organization."
What do you think are some of the best product videos out there? Did they inspire you to buy from the company? Let us know in the comments section below.
Editor's Note: This post was originally published in September 2013 and has been updated for freshness, accuracy, and comprehensiveness.
In fact, I'm willing to bet that you can think of a dozen instances where timing has been responsible for the success or failure of a particular task. For example, in cooking, it can mean the difference between a culinary triumph and a big, burnt mess. And in comedy, it can determine whether a joke falls flat or evokes a raucous laugh.
The same applies to content marketing. In order for our efforts to amount to anything, marketers must be focused on delivering the right content, to the right people, at the right time, right?
But, how do you go about ensuring you achieve all of the above? To help, I've detailed six quick tips to get you thinking more strategically about the type of content you're producing, and how timing might influence its success.
6 Tips for Creating the Right Content at the Right Time
1) Get to know your audience.
Understanding who your customers are is the first step in ensuring any content created engages with the right people and achieves its objectives -- whether that’s to raise brand awareness, increase traffic and conversions, or build quality links to improve your search ranking.
Most businesses will capture data on people who have used their services or bought their products in the past to draw up a generalised picture of potential customers. (Check out this resource for free templates to help you build out your personas.)
Another way to gather data for your personas is to extract it from social media. Facebook's Audience Insights is a great tool to simplify this process, as it allows yousee the demographic of a business’ audience, as well as their gender, relationship status, interest sets, job niches, etc. It can even tell you the amount of time a specific audience spends on Facebook and the time of day they are accessing it. (For a beginners’ guide on how to access this data, check outthis article from our social media manager, Naomi Parry.)
Another way to get a better understanding of an audience is throughYouGov profiler. This tool allows you to search for brands, people, or things and -- as long as there is enough data available -- find out facts about them including political persuasion, favourite foods, hobbies and other brands they are interested in.
2) Identify opportunities for campaign alignment.
There are many reasons a business needs to invest in content marketing. To get the wheels turning, here are a few examples:
Give their brand a voice/personality
Engage with their audience
Encourage upsell opportunities
Secure a higher ranking in search
Increase brand awareness
Build domain authority
Increase traffic and conversions
To shape your strategy, think about the content you are producing and which of the above you want it to achieve. For example, if you're looking to drive traffic to an ebook to increase conversions, you may want to create supporting blog articles that link to the CTA. Thinking about how the content you're creating (or plan to create) fits in with other promotion and campaigns you're currently running will help you become more purposeful in your approach to content creation.
One of the best ways to align your marketing projects is to create a detailed content calendar. This should list content being worked on, campaign launch dates, and other events that your team should be aware of when planning content. For example, if you work in the gardening industry, find out when national events such as the Royal Horticultural Society Show are taking place, think about other national holidays and celebrations (Mother's Day, Valentine's Day, etc.) that could influence your customers, and make sure your content calendar details all the other promotional campaigns your business is involved in.
3) Figure out the right content mix and flow.
Once you know who you are talking to and what you want to accomplish, you need to think about the types of content that your audience/potential customers will want to consume.
Will they want downloadable, detailed ebooks and guides? What about short and snappy blog posts? Are they looking for in-depth articles answering specific questions? What about visual content such as infographics? What role will video play in your strategy?
To cater to your buyer personas, you need to provide a mix of different content types. Think of your website as if it were a newspaper or magazine. Print journalism specialises in offering variety for its readers -- from hard news stories to picture spreads to personality profiles to option columns. Make sure the content on your site offers the same.
4) Experiment with reactive marketing.
Often executed through social media channels, reactive marketing is one of the best ways to prove that your company is staying on top of industry trends and changes. To give you a better sense of what this approach looks like, check out some of these examples of reactive marketing in action:
This August, Arena Flowers reacted to the news that hackers had downloaded the details of 37 million account holders of the Ashley Madison infidelity site, by sending out a tweet announcing it was offering 10% off all ‘Apology’ flowers.
When Uruguay striker Luis Suarez hit the headlines after biting Italian defender Giorgio Chiellini in the 2014 World Cup, Snickers’ marketing team sent Suarez the clever tweet above. This was retweeted more than 45,000 times.
When the wrong Korean flag was mistakenly displayed during the Olympics in 2012, the eye care company, Specsavers, seamlessly tied it into its "Should have gone to Specsavers" adverting campaign.
These examples prove that quickly taking advantage of a trending issue can be a very effective marketing tool. However, it's important to note that you should be careful when selecting an event or trend to jump on. As a rule of thumb, avoid anything that might be offensive to people such as a religious instance or natural disaster.
5) Stay informed.
When I was a cub reporter for a regional newspaper, we used to get all the national press delivered to our office every day. As part of my job, I would have to read through the broadsheets and tabloids to see if any of their stories could be localised. I was a great way to stay "in the know."
To ensure that your business doesn't fall behind, it's important that you're regularly checking out news websites and industry blogs to see what people are writing about. Other websites such as BuzzSumo and Google Trends are also a great place to discover which topics, related to your business or customers' business, get the most attention.
Another interesting platform for this type of discovery is NewsWhip. This tool helps you track and predict the spread of stories on social networks and find what people are talking about. And Spike, NewsWhip’s pro-tool dashboard, shows what content is capturing the world’s attention in real time.
Content teams should use this emerging information to brainstorm more "forward thinking" pieces that offer a fresh perspective. And getting the timing right is particularly important here.
As soon as you notice a hot topic beginning to emerge, you need to act fast to avoid piling on. Similar to the reactive marketing examples above, the quicker you can deliver the content, the better.
6) Test different posting times.
There's a lot of research out there on determining the best time to send and publish content on social media, email, blogs, etc. While I'd always urge you to test these things for yourself, here's some of the best advice I've come across:
Facebook. Research byBuffer into Facebook’s News Feed algorithm found engagement rates are 18% higher on Thursdays and Fridays and 32% higher at weekends. The best times vary, with stats ranging from 1pm to get the most shares and 3pm to get more clicks; generally early afternoon is a solid time to post.
Twitter. A recent study by Twitter found that 81% of users are more likely to be on Twitter during their commute home and the highest time for retweets is early evening, while a huge piece ofresearch by the Buffer teamsuggests that the best engagement comes in the early hours of the morning. Those that tweet between 2-3am earn the most clicks on average.
Emails. Research carried outby MailChimp, found that 8am – 11am and 12 – 2pm is the best time to send your newsletters for the best response rate but that timings varies enormously depending on audience.
Blog Posts. Track Mavenanalysed almost 5,000 blogslast year and discovered a high correlation between those that published posts on a weekend and a higher average number of social shares, putting it down to the lack of ‘competition’ for headspace and engagement.
Again, I recommend that you use these finding to inspire your own tests for determining optimal send and publish times. While they may have worked for these companies, you can often expect to see different results from different audience types.
What are your favorite tips for posting the right content at the right time? Share them with us in the comments section below.
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