Tag: iphone

Marketing on YouTube

YouTube

YouTube, the video-sharing website, was created in 2005, and since then has become one of the largest, most visited websites in the world. YouTube has massive traffic and viewers with over 1,325,000,000 people utilizing it for personal, educational, and commercial reasons. There are currently 300 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute of every day – that’s five hours of video content every second! 4,959,000,000 YouTube videos are viewed daily, and the total number of hours of video watched on YouTube each month is approximately 3.25 billion.

Today, YouTube is a critical marketing tool for any company in any industry. In fact, since its launch, the Top 100 Global Brands have published a total of 258,000 videos across 1,378 YouTube channels, attracting over 9.5 billion total views. What helps makes YouTube such an essential element of any marketing strategy is its ease of importing and uploading video content. With a simple flip camera, or even a mobile phone with video capabilities, basic videos can be created. And because of its easy-to-use format, messages on YouTube can spread quickly and efficiently across a variety of mediums including Facebook and Twitter, embedded in websites, and via email. In addition, the end user does not need a special viewer, such as Windows Media Play or Quick Time, to view a YouTube video.

Marketing experts agree that there is no simpler, more direct, and easily absorbed way to display information than through video content. 15 seconds of video can be more engaging and provide more observable information than an entire page of ads. And because consumers are no longer satisfied by physical ads or static marketing, and, more than ever, want interactive, aesthetic, and engaging material, YouTube video marketing, when used efficiently and intelligently, can help build trust and establish a company’s authority. Uploading video content, which contains a company’s views and ideas, provides an aura of expertise and influence. By uploading videos with tips and strategies, businesses can not only get attention, but also provide help and value to their customers.

Beyond viewing of the video, YouTube offers marketers several different ways to connect with their target audience. For example, viewers are able to leave feedback and comments on the videos. This allows viewers to interact not only with each other, but also with the company. This opens a line of communication between customers and company. Businesses are able to reply to comments, post questions, opinions, and engage with their viewers. This can have a remarkable impact on branding because new viewers will be able to see and read the back and forth communication between the business and other viewers. This humanizes the business, and makes them appear as approachable, professional, and helpful.

In order to maximize YouTube’s potential, the following best practices should be followed: • Produce video content as consistently as possible. The best-performing brands publish high volumes of content on a regular schedule.
• Learn and perfect YouTube’s architecture and SEO rules. The best-performing brands take more care in optimizing their videos and channels, and maintain more playlists and video tags.
• Videos do not need to be over-produced; content tends to be more important than video quality.
• Integrate YouTube videos with all other online marketing strategies. Facebook and Twitter are among the most important sources of traffic on YouTube.
• Apply branding consistently and methodically. Top performers brand their videos in both the video content itself as well as in metadata, which includes titles, tags, and descriptions.

Apple’s iPhone 6 Release Highlights the Need for Responsive Design

The Apple iPhone 6 and 6+ have launched, and demand is so high users who order are facing order fulfillment delays reaching into October. The delays don’t seem to dampening sales, however. “Response to iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus has been incredible, with a record number of preorders overnight,” Apple told the Financial Times.

To avoid these delays, users are waiting in long lines at the brick-and-mortar stores of major retailers and wireless carriers who sell the phone. “There are going to be ridiculously huge lines,” Tim Bajarin, an analyst with Creative Strategies, tells USA Today. “Demand for iPhone 6 is so high.”

Reports indicate many of those waiting in line may be app developers or their proxies. This is because developers are anxious to immediately update their apps to run on the new phone and new operating system. Apps for both Apple and Android products have skyrocketed, after all, following the general trend toward greater smartphone use.

What does this mean for businesses? To put it simply, increased. Just as the surge in internet use a decade ago drove companies online, forcing them to build an online presence in order to reach customers, the new wave of increased smartphone use demands that companies now field online sites that can be easily viewed and used on smartphones. When possible, companies are also developing apps to make connecting with customers even easier.

In the past, websites were designed solely for use on computers with relatively large monitors. As mobile internet was developed, users found these sites difficult to view and use on the smaller screens offered by portable devices. The original answer to this question was the development of separate, similar mobile sites designed to be easier to view and use on smaller screens.

The technology has advanced, however, and now websites can be built that automatically query the users device when they access the site in order to determine the size of the screen. Based on the answer, the site then chooses from one of several ready-made format options designed to best different ranges of screen sizes. This is called “responsive website design.”

40 percent of users will abandon a site that takes just three seconds to load.
40 percent of users will abandon a site that takes just three seconds to load.

Determining the right format for the user’s device isn’t the only key to responsive design, however. A properly designed website can also load faster on mobile devices. Even a good 4G connection loads slower than most wired or wireless broadband internet connections, and some flashy features like sliders and large-format graphics that look great on a large screen and load easily through a broadband connection can load dramatically slower on mobile connections. Responsive websites determine the user’s speed and delay or eliminate the loading of these bandwidths hog as necessary. Remember, as we have discussed in another blog article, 40 percent of users will abandon a site that takes as little as three seconds to load, and 79 percent won’t return to a site they previously had trouble loading. In this business, time is quite literally money.

How do you know if your site is responsive? Odds are, if your site wasn’t built in the last year or tow or hasn’t been extensively updated or overhauled in that time, it isn’t – or at the least isn’t using the current full capabilities of responsive design. Here’s a good way to check: Pull out your smartphone. Open your web browser. Enter your site address. If you can’t view or use the site easily, odds are your customers also can’t…or won’t.

If you need a responsive web site designed, or an existing website overhauled to be responsive, at The Click Experts, we can help. We know responsive coding inside and out, and have the knowledge and experience to put it to work for you and your business. This means we can build responsive designs into both template and custom sites. We also build custom apps for both Android and iPhone, so if your company wants there to be “an app for that”, we can help. We offer free quotes, so there’s no excuse to check and see how custom apps and/or a website featuring responsive design can benefit your business. Don’t lose customers due to bad design. Contact The Click Experts today!

Apple introduces the new iPhone 6: