Award-Winning Content by Viewstream Posted by Priscilla De La Rosa on January 17, 2018 Take a look at all our best work! From branding to production, media planning to content delivery, and design and development. We promise you won’t be disappointed. Originally published at spark.adobe.com/page/qi22saZ1Vsu2F/
From AI to ABM: 2018 Trends Every Marketer Should Know Posted by John Assalian on December 19, 2017 1. Video Domination In a world where we spend a billion hours on YouTube every single day, video content isn’t going anywhere and will only continue to grow. This is especially true when it comes to explainer videos and tutorial content. We’re also seeing an increased shift towards mobile content. For years non-mobile dominated the video ad market, but it looks like 2017 may be the final year of that being a reality. Zenith says that 2018 will be the first year in which mobile ad spending finally outpaces its non-mobile counterpart. According to Recode 25% more video will be watched by people on mobile in 2018, and in the coming year spending on mobile advertising is expected to increase by almost 50% to $18 billion. Due to all these factors, it will be effective for companies to find new ways to incorporate video into their advertising. In social media, for example, big platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn often charge less on a CPM basis for video views. Also, think about places to use video that aren’t that traditional, in the example being Video Brochures created by Viewstream, which deliver HD-quality sound and video in the form of a paper brochure. 2. Artificial Intelligence Buzz As Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, and customer data become more advanced and user-friendly, we are seeing them become much more a part of the successful marketers toolbox. A report from Salesforce shows that the most successful marketing teams are 2x more likely to include AI in their campaigns, so marketers expect more growth in this area than any other over the next two years. Effective use of consumer data will be just important as AI over the same time period. Consumers prefer to be engaged in ways that feel personalized for them, and their data will play a critical role in creating content that has a genuine human touch. That extra spice that makes the difference. 3. Chatbots: The Voice of the Future One specific aspect of artificial intelligence worth talking about on its own is the rise of chatbots as consumer agents. Moving forward you will continue to see an increase in companies large and small using chatbots to improve their customer service experience and, according to Gartner, the majority of buyer-business interactions will be facilitated by chatbots. While chatbots may not be everyone’s vision of the future companies may be warming up to the idea of them. In a recent article, Forrester Research predicted that 70% of companies will expect to implement some kind of artificial intelligence in the next 12 months. Forrester claims this increase in AI-adoption can be attributed to improved user interfaces and analytics solutions for these AIs. Chatbots are something that most people are already familiar with, but advancements in technology and chatbot personalization means that they will only become more widely used as we enter into 2018 and the years beyond. 4. Personalization Creates Engagement It is really not possible to understate the effect that personalized communications can have on your marketing. Consumers are much more likely to be engaged and responsive to a message that is personalized in some way for them, making it critical that companies know what each individual needs. Even something as little as industry personalization of your campaigns will show an improvement in conversions. Personalization is such a big influencer for buyers that a lack of it can affect their purchases going forward. Salesforce found that 65% of B2B consumers and 52% of B2C were likely to switch brands if the company in question did not personalize messages to their consumers. This is even true of traditional email marketing, Maven Commerce showed that personalizing emails can increase open rate from 15.03% to 56.43%, and CTR from 1.13% to 31.13%. 5. ABM Goes Beyond Hype to More Content Tailoring Account Based Marketing has become one of those buzz words that means anything to anyone. ABM is essentially a strategy to focus on prospects that truly fit your ideal customer profile. Using a targeted account list (think the exact customer profile that buys your stuff) makes the whole marketing process, from strategy to creative to media, more focused on those likely to buy. It’s like a billboard that only your target customers can see. Most companies have some ABM initiative in place for the last twelve months and will expand in 2018. We recommend really focusing on the target account list and keeping that constantly updated. This allows you to do more targeted content tailoring to specific industries, roles and account names. The more tailored the better the results. Due to ABM’s hyper-focused human strategy, be strategic when compiling “the list” and give more weight to warm leads with whom you’ve already established some type of relationship. Finally, stop doing billboard marketing, and use your Account Based Marketing list in your actual media spend, with such tools as Google AdWords Match, Facebook custom audiences, and your DMP custom segments. 6. Marketing in the Decentralized Era Blockchain begins to mature in 2018 and is a megatrend that will change most aspects of computing as we know it. We are really in the infrastructure building stage of blockchain, so the tools for marketers don’t yet exist. With that said, there is a lot to learn for all marketers on the overall ecosystem for the decentralized era. To do so, check out this article “The Two Spheres of Blockchain Marketing” by Joshua Shane, Managing Director at Viewstream.
The Two Spheres of Blockchain Marketing Posted by Joshua Shane on December 11, 2017 There are two kinds of blockchain founders. Founders from the cryptocurrency community and founders who are not. Blockchain is a complex technology and it’s driven by the most tightly-knit tech community I’ve been a part of. If you’re a blockchain company founder, you won’t succeed if you don’t join this community — no matter how deeply you’ve mastered your own market. The Two Audiences for Blockchain Marketing Working with the cryptocurrency community and ecosystem is an essential first step. The community understands blockchain business models, and they have the cryptocurrency to invest in new blockchain ventures. The second focus should be your market and users, including enterprise clients, end-users, and the public. Two phases of marketing match up with these two audiences. The first is fundraising. The second is go-to-market strategy and execution. Fundraising as Marketing Campaign VCs have been the backbone of the tech industry for three decades. This has mostly been a 1:1 process. To raise smart money, you needed a great idea, a strong team and clear path to product/market fit. It’s how innovative product ideas and business models have raised funds to make their way to market. Beyond some good PR aircover, startups didn’t need a robust pre-raise marketing strategy to close funding. But there are downsides to “smart” VC money. They take significant equity ownership, their influence is concentrated and their goals may, in time, conflict with the company’s users. This model has been turned on its head with ICOs. In 2012, Obama signed the JOBS Act. Title III of the JOBS Act enabled crowdfunding for the first time in the US. Now, crowdfunding can be the best way to raise money for tokenized, blockchain-based companies and foundations. This is a new step — a different step — in startup creation and growth. Instead of soliciting attention from a handful of VCs, blockchain companies raise money from the “crowd.” In this case, the crowd is made up of everyone who owns cryptocurrency. The Cryptocurrency Sphere. The capitalization of cryptocurrencies now exceeds $350 billion. A productive way to think of the cryptocurrency sphere is as a huge bank. Cryptocurrency holders, mostly Bitcoin and Ethereum, have all their money sloshing around in the cryptocurrency sphere, searching for investments to diversify their portfolios. They don’t want to pull their funds out of crypto markets because they don’t want to pay taxes. Especially when they’d just to turn around and reinvest the funds as fiat currency. So where will they invest? ICOs, of course. But here’s the challenge: Cryptocurrency holders are much more likely to invest and trust in blockchain startups that include people they’ve known from the crypto community. I’ve met scores of startup founders who don’t understand this dynamic and are confused why they’re having trouble raising funds via ICOs. The reason they’re having trouble is that they’re not well known within the cryptocurrency sphere. The deep irony of this decentralized, crypto revolution is that, for now, success hinges on tight integration with this closely-knit community. The “Traditional” Marketing Sphere After engaging with the crypto community and raising money, blockchain companies need to execute a totally different playbook for go-to-market. Fortunately, this is familiar to most marketers. It’s the traditional integrated digital marketing approach. But there is still a challenge explaining the value and benefits of blockchain solutions to these traditional enterprises, government and consumer audiences. Traditional marketing audiences don’t care about blockchains, hash-rates or tokenized economies. They care about new services and capabilities that will improve their business. They care about lower transaction costs and new ways to trade. Clearly translating how real-world users get these benefits from blockchain-based solutions will be the ongoing work of blockchain marketing.
How Brands Can Defend Against Disruption Posted by Priscilla De La Rosa on November 27, 2017 Hear from Viewstream’s VP of Strategy, Joshua Shane, on how Brands can defend against disruption by planning their own digital transformation for marketing insight and action. Read the article: How Brands Should Deal with Disruption Courtesy of Netflix
Video Brochures for Fun and Profit Posted by Priscilla De La Rosa on November 17, 2017 Bring your sales and marketing into the modern age with a Video Brochure, a stylish way to get your audiences to go “Aha!”. Video Brochures offer an exciting and innovative way to present videos using a format most people haven’t seen. When the Video Brochure is opened your brand or product video will be displayed in high definition with superb sound quality. Featuring a wide variety of customization options and designed in-house with your brand in mind, Video Brochures excite the viewer while promoting and enriching your message. If your usual techniques just aren’t getting the job done anymore then Video Brochures can be just what you need to ensure that you are engaging with your audience in the best way possible. Clients like NVIDIA, Adobe, Autodesk and more have used for field marketing, sales, events and product launches. For more information and pricing, visit: https://spark.adobe.com/page/rAeynoUmmTU5b/
Viewstream Agency Credentials Video Posted by Priscilla De La Rosa on October 4, 2017 Take a look at Viewstream’s new and improved Agency credentials videos. With tons of new work, we wanted to update with some fresh content. Some of the featured clients: Autodesk, Adobe, NVIDIA , Zendesk, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Dynamics 365. If you are interested in seeing how to market to human beings and not bots – send us an email! We would love to discuss what Viewstream can do for you.
Viewstream Keeps Raking in New Awards! Posted by Priscilla De La Rosa on September 13, 2017 Viewstream can’t be stopped! With such a hectic and amazing year coming to a rapid close, Viewstream is thrilled to add three Telly Awards to our collection. The 38th Annual Telly Awards has prized Viewstream with three awards in the category of Commericals / Marketing. The Telly Awards honors the best of the best for creative work in video and film productions. Viewstream was especially recognized for our creative videos for Microsoft/Toshiba, Adobe, and Autodesk. Check the videos out below: The Power of Great Experiences Superhero Series AutoCAD 360 in 36 Seconds
Six Award-Winning Videos Posted by Priscilla De La Rosa on May 4, 2017 Take a look at Viewstream’s 6 award-winning videos. Microsoft IoT Solutions A text driven educational video about the Internet of Things, sounds boring right? Think again. Toshiba Superhero series Toshiba wanted a straight ahead product demo, we did this and they loved it! Now it’s a franchise. To see more of the award-winning videos, click this link. If you are interested in seeing how to market to beings and not bots — contact us! We would love to discuss what Viewstream can do fo you.
Market Share from Marketing Posted by John Assalian on April 25, 2017 How much of your market share do you get from marketing? Most people overestimate what marketing can do over a couple quarters, but underestimate how effective marketing can be over ten quarters. The goal is to get to the goal faster: a great marketing campaign will help a great product take off, or a bad product fail faster. In other words, if your marketing doesn’t work, then you save money in the long run by failing fast and moving to your next successful campaign. We believe marketing is about scale. We must constantly move the market with your product and brand vision. The biggest problem in marketing today is irrelevance. In a world bombarded with marketing messages, retreat is not an option. You must stand out and advance. Viewstream would love to help you scale through our insights, strategy, creative, media and analytics.
Your Customer Is More Believable Than You Are Posted by Tom Jagger on April 20, 2017 Greetings Fellow Video Marketers! We have a lot of metrics these days – way too many metrics. We can get caught up in the magic of Marketing Automation to the point we forget that people aren’t automated. We have such a need to get the word out, sometimes we forget that the delivery system can be just as important as your message. So how does a company deliver its marketing message without sounding like we want them to drink our kool-aid? When it comes to delivering an honest, sincere, believable message, no one can help you like your successful customer. You’ve changed the way they work. They love it! Let them be the voice that spreads the good word. Autodesk asked us to work with PCL construction to tell the story of their BIM 360 product in use. If your customer doing something life changing, or of general human interest with your product – you have struck gold! As an example, check out this video for the foundation of the Microsoft Cloud – Windows Azure. If you are interested in seeing how to market to beings and not bots – send me an email! I would love to discuss what Viewstream can do for you.