Kiva is a nonprofit, but on a higher level it’s also a solid, solid brand. Take a close look at its marketing, and you might mistake it for a PR- and viral marketer-enriched company: by the measure of its captive audience, it wouldn’t be absurd to think that Kiva contracts a legion of brand agencies across the globe.
The microfinance platform has fans across so many different communities, the vast majority of whom are unbridled evangelists. Kiva has been featured in The New York Times, on Oprah, and on more influencer blogs than anyone can name. Clearly the brand is sterling.
We think that other organizations can learn from Kiva’s marketing success — and this includes for-profits.
Continue reading ‘Designing the Right Engagement Ladder’
A follow-up to our earlier post on email marketing — in this special guest article, Scott Jahnke, the Director of Student and Young Alumni Development at Stanford University, discusses some recent fundraising campaigns that his department has built and distributed through the Involver platform.
We’re glad that we’ve had the opportunity to help Stanford improve its fundraising ROI. As Scott mentions below, our platform helped Stanford achieve a 23% increase in gifts from a key target audience (2008 totals vs. 2007 totals) — a real testament to the power of effective video marketing.
If you’re in the nonprofit sector or higher education sector, we hope you’ll read and share Scott’s wonderful post!
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It has been a challenging fiscal year so far. Fundraising is always somewhat difficult, but the economic uncertainty and gloom that seem to come at us from every angle on a daily basis has made it even more difficult to get our message out effectively. The most important questions fundraisers need to answer are: Why are we asking you for a gift? What is going to change if you give? And how will our organization make that change happen? In the fundraising world, this is called a case for support. Continue reading ‘The View from Stanford: Why Video Marketing and Email Marketing Make a Perfect Match’
Josh Bernoff over at the Groundswell blog has defined email marketing as “…email that is sent to a carefully chosen group of people with the expectation of forming or extending a relationship.”
This is a general definition, but it’s a useful one. Relationship-building should be your first concern when promoting your brand identity and/or products through an email newsletter or blast-out.
Fortunately, there’s a veritable wealth of manuals out there about how to write better email outreach, as well as how to time and space out your send-outs for better open rates and more clickthroughs. That said, it’s clear that more research can and should be done about the separate issue of email design — i.e., the ways in which email marketing messages are best designed and packaged outside of brute content considerations. This is where video marketing can play an important role. Continue reading ‘Why you should incorporate video marketing into your email marketing’
Earlier this month, our second article was published in MediaPost’s Video Insider. It’s entitled “Partnering with Your Employees: Creating Brand Ambassadorship Within Your Organization,” and I think it’s worth the quick 3-minute read. Here’s an excerpt to help you decide:
More often than not, a key to building better relationships with your audiences requires that you connect them to a real person who can serve as a sincere face for — a more humanized angle to — your brand identity. Here, empowering your own employees to promote your viral campaigns can lower your acquisition/marketing costs, create a tangible brand experience for your audiences, and boost morale within your organization.
If you’re running viral campaigns (using video and/or social methods), you should read this article. What are you waiting for? Check it out.
When we work with clients to carry out their brand marketing strategies, we’ll of course always ask them the key question: What are your goals for your video campaign?
Because digital marketers are an intensely numbers-driven and numbers-oriented lot, we’ll often hear answers like:
- “I want to generate 200,000 views of my video content.”
- “I want to attract a lot more people to my video app compared to what we’re getting now through our brand’s Facebook group.”
- “I want my video to be shared within communities of young people — our company’s target audience.”
Definitely, we’re grateful to work with such clear mindsets and execute against such precise company goals. The Involver platform has been able to produce more than a few home run video campaigns — and we’ve been able to do this, in part, because our clients have been helpfully adamant about communicating their success benchmarks.
Now, after running thousands of campaigns, we just have one more substantive idea to add to this whole goal-setting topic. Continue reading ‘What kind of brand engagement do you want?’
Last week The Wall Street Journal published a thoughtful piece by Julia Angwin entitled “Recipe for a Successful Viral Video Campaign.” The article begins by discussing the increasing difficulty of marketing on YouTube, and the unique difficulty of achieving repeat “viral video hits” on YouTube. The illustrative example used is Judson Laipply’s famous “Evolution of Dance” clip: while Jud’s first vid has received over 114 million views, his sequel — for which he’s spent tens of thousands of dollars in supportive marketing — has so far only generated 4 million views.
Ian Schafer, chief executive at the visionary agency Deep Focus, put it this way in the article: “”If you just upload to YouTube, it’s like dropping a grain of sand on the beach.”
What’s the fix here? How can a company’s content compete against the 150,000+ new videos that are uploaded to YouTube each day? Continue reading ‘What Makes a Successful Viral Video Campaign?’
Often journalists and clients ask us what metrics we are developing or what metrics they should be paying attention to in the coming months. It’s a world that’s seeing massive iteration and is crowded with many people putting their spin on the issues, but we see the trend clearly.
Most practitioners are moving closer and closer to measuring Total Engagement of a viewer. An article we wrote on this topic, “New Metrics For Success In Video Marketing,” appeared in MediaPost’s Video Insider blog today. Go check it out. Here’s an excerpt: Continue reading ‘New Metrics for Success In Video Marketing’
Last month BusinessWeek published a feature article on social networks.
The title of the article, “Social Networks Are the New Web Portals,” suggests some striking — and perhaps controversial — comparisons. If social networks are really the new web portals, does this mean that MySpace, for example, will one day dethrone a portal like Yahoo!? Or, does this mean that, one day, the average internet user will write all of their emails using Facebook instead of Hotmail or Gmail?
Well, one can prognosticate all they want. On his part, the article’s author Jeffrey F. Rayport does a good job of picking apart what’s inevitable and what’s not in the recent rise of social networks. For instance, he emphasizes that the largest ones are right now aggressively vying for users’ time and attention via Facebook Connect, OpenSocial, Google’s Friend Connect, and other platforms and tools. So, arguably it’s not clear who the big competitive winner will be, or if there’s actually room for more than a few innovators. Continue reading ‘BusinessWeek: “Social Networks Are the New Web Portals”’
Some fresh Facebook stats from the Pew Internet & American Life Project (as reported by Econsultancy) show that social networks are here to stay.
According to a January 2009 Pew report, 35% of adult internet users in the U.S. now have at least one social networking profile. More impressive here is the incredible rate of growth: this 35% is up from 8% in 2005. Continue reading ‘Pew Report: Social networks are growing exponentially’
In talking to prospective users of our video marketing platform, sometimes we’re asked: “How will we able to tell that our campaign members are really engaging with our brand”?
On one level, this is an easy question to answer. Our video syndication service generates real video views for our clients. In turn, this translates into measurable time spent with one’s brand. In other words, X viewers watch a video that delivers one’s marketing messages for X aggregate minutes. As an added plus, these viewers can also spend X minutes looking at a video player frame that contains one’s logo or other relevant images. (Note: Such video player branding is an additional service that we provide.) Continue reading ‘Proving Engagement’