March 19, 2022

Proven easy ways to integrate TikTok into your video marketing strategy

Source: Unsplash

Looking for the secret sauce guaranteed to boost your company’s video marketing strategy?

TikTok may be exactly what you’re looking for. This worldwide phenomenon originally soared in popularity with younger audience members and is now amassing even more users in older demographics thanks to the hours of entertainment it promises.

What does this mean for you as a business owner? Frankly, it means you need to be on it and figure out how to show up and show off. While having a presence on TikTok can be beneficial to nearly any business in any market, it’s an especially strategic move for those targeting females ages 16 to 39 as this demographic makes up the majority of app users.

Here are some ways you can integrate TikTok into your video marketing strategy right away.

What You Can Expect

Before you start investing time, energy, and money into your TikTok marketing, you may be wondering what you can expect to get in return. Is this even worth the effort?

Well, how would you like to see the following:
● Better connection between your business and online communities.
● Increased Brand Awareness.
● More engagement with your products and services.
● Improved conversions for advertisements.

If those sound like something you’d be interested in seeing for your business, let’s move along and find out how you can achieve them thanks to the help of TikTok.

Getting started with TikTok

If you’re entirely new to the app, you’ll need to first set up a TikTok business account so you’ll have access to analytics, insights, editing tools, and other metrics that will help you gauge the effectiveness of your efforts. Next, take a look around the app and familiarize yourself with its features while starting to build your presence.

Take notice of trending topics, hashtags, and content with high views. What do you notice about them? Why are people engaging with it? By taking note of these observations, you’ll be better prepared when it comes time to make your own content.

Finally, start engaging with other brands and the TikTok community. This is the kind of app that works best when you’re actively communicating with others instead of just sitting back and watching.
‘Like’ videos, subscribe to users, even post comments. These small acts of engagement are all part of your TikTok strategy so spend some time building your presence.

Get your toes wet

Now that you’ve taken the time to observe other users, it’s time to get your toes wet and create some of your first content. Don’t worry, this is the fun part! Play around with the filters TikTok offers and don’t take yourself too seriously! TikTok is universally entertaining because it showcases authenticity so just be real and get to creating.

Keys to success

As with any form of marketing, especially in the social media world, the first key to success is to be consistent. Set a schedule for posting content and try your best to keep it. Even if you’re just putting out a short clip, it’s better than being inactive.
Let your audience peek behind the curtain and see the “real” you with behind-the-scenes content and interviews. Post something silly like a TikTok challenge. Or, create a how-to video for one of your products.

Key point: post often.

The BIG goal

When it comes to TikTok, the Holy Grail is being featured on someone’s ‘For You’ page. This content is curated for users with AI and is based on their past views and interactions.
Getting your content on this feed will boost your interactions as more and more users like and comment on your video. Once your post gets in the flow, your content can live in perpetuity and your new followers will be as organic as they come.

Top ways to use TikTok for business

Now that you understand more about TikTok, let’s look at the top three ways your business can use it to your advantage. It’s not all about posting content, believe it or not!

#1. Post TikTok videos — Now, we said it’s not ALL about posting content but that doesn’t mean doing so isn’t the best way to utilize TikTok. Finding ways to creatively engage your audience through videos is crucial to your TikTok success.
Your posts need to be fun, authentic, engaging, and consistent. Think about what your followers want to see and find a way to give it to them.

#2. Team up with influencers — Before you give us a huge eye roll, hear us out. Influencers have gotten a bad rep in the media but they can actually be hugely beneficial to your business.
How? Imagine the biggest influencers on TikTok posting raving reviews about your product or service. What do you think their followers are going to do? Finding the right influencers to partner with can be a game-changer for a business!

#3. Run TikTok ads — This wouldn’t be a marketing blog if we didn’t talk about paid advertising, right? TikTok advertising is one of the best places to spend your marketing dollars and it currently gives you five different ways to do so:

▪️In-Feed Ads: These ads are posted on the user’s ‘For You’ page and from there can be shared, liked, and commented on. With an engaging Call to Action, your ad can give a huge boost to your revenue.
▪️Top-View Ads: As TikTok says, these ads are ‘top of feed, top of mind.’ While they’re also featured on the FYP, these ads present your brand first on someone’s news feed.
▪️Brand Takeovers: These short ads appear when a user first opens their app before they even get to their news feed.
▪️Branded Hashtags: This option can be a part of your influencer strategy and is a fast and easy way to increase engagement.
▪️Branded Effects: The most creative option, your company can create a branded filter or effect that users can create their own content with.

Time is TikTok-ing
Forgive the pun but the truth remains: it’s time to get your business on TikTok and start boosting your video marketing strategy by utilizing this insanely popular app.

Remember, the key is having fun with your content so followers will engage with it and share, share, share! What will you create first?

— Torrey Tayenaka is the co-founder and CEO at Sparkhouse, a corporate video production agency. He is often asked to contribute expertise in publications like Entrepreneur, Single Grain and Forbes.
Sparkhouse is known for transforming video marketing and advertising into real conversations.Rather than hitting the consumer over the head with blatant ads, Sparkhouse creates interesting, entertaining and useful videos that enrich the lives of his clients’ customers.
In addition to Sparkhouse, Torrey has also founded the companies Eva Smart Shower, Litehouse & Forge54.

• Posted 3.19.22 at 06:17 am by Roy Osing
• Permalink

March 14, 2022

How your customer service can be made mistake proof

Source: Unsplash

How your customer service can be made mistake proof.

Successful organizations figure out how to make their customer service OOPS! resistant.

They’re mindlessly focused on how they handle mistakes. It’s all very well to talk about doing it right the first time and providing seamless transactions, but it’s a pipe dream.

The reality is that mistakes will always happen in organizations regardless of the good intentions to ensure they don’t happen. Mistakes cannot be mitigated. The chances of them occurring can be reduced but they can’t be completely eradicated.

Mistakes are a way of life in modern organizations. Humans are not perfect not are they predictable. Technology has its glitches. And systems break down.

So in a marketplace replete with mistake-making, how does an organization gain a competitive advantage over the other mistake-makers?

Do they try and make fewer of them in which case their competitive claim might be ‘Buy from us because we make fewer mistakes than our competitors’?

Or do they go back to the first principles of Quality Management and claim that they are the only ones who deliver what customers expect error-free every time?

No. The only way to gain an advantage in a mistake-riddled world is to pursue two tactics simultaneously:
1. OOPS!-proof the organization as best you can to prevent mistakes from occurring, and
2. Build a recovery strategy to action when #1 doesn’t work and an OOPS! occurs.

OOPS!-proofing

OOPS!-proofing your organization means creating the infrastructure and environment that reduces (not eliminates) the chances of mistakes occurring.

Here’s a checklist:

▪️Examine your rule and policy architecture. Do the rules and policies you have enable easy customer transactions or do they get in the way because customers refuse to follow them (because they think they’re dumb).
▪️Check your culture and values. What comes first: quarterly earnings or amazing experiences? Does your organization put the customer on a pedestal and subordinate everyone in it to creating memorable experiences for them?
Do you have a value that specifically says ‘We exist to provide memories for our customers every time they touch us’?
▪️Ask customers to help design systems, processes and procedures that affect them. An OOPS! is less likely to happen if a customer is doing business with you in a way they helped architect.
▪️Spend more money on training your frontline people. If they know more, they will fail less.
▪️Remove the grunge that gets in the way of employees doing their job. Fighting unnecessary internal resistance gets in the way of focusing on taking care of the customer which causes sh** to happen.

OOPS! reaction

Even if you’ve OOPS!-proofed your organization as best you can to minimize the chances of mistakes happening, they will happen. That’s just the way it is.

So with that reality in mind, the OOPS!-proofer prepares themselves to recover when the mistake is in their face.

Their business plan has a specific strategy to be the best mistake fixer in the market, and there’s good rationale for taking this position.

Brilliant recovery is a customer loyalty builder; customers are more impressed with how the mistake is fixed than being upset about the mistake being made in the first place.

What does brilliant recovery look like? The ‘formula’ for OOPS! recovery is quite simple:

Recovery = Fix the mistake fast and surprise the OOPS! victim with something they don’t expect.

Studies have shown that customer positivity—and loyalty—towards an organization that has screwed them over actually increases after a successful recovery compared to how they felt toward the organization before the OOPS! happened (which is a function of the cumulative experiences they’ve had with the organization to date).

Furthermore, they show that recovery must be achieved within 24 hours of the OOPS! event to have a positive impact. If you haven’t recovered in 24 hours, the opportunity is lost and perhaps the customer with it.

The proper OOPS! recovery is a business loyalty builder and yet few organizations plan for it.

How does one build an OOPS! recovery plan?

Here are a few plan-building steps to consider:

#1.Work on your culture — Most cultures encourage mistake avoidance; mistakes result in added cost because of the rework involved in making things right.

The OOPS!-recovery artist knows that the special sauce is not trying to eliminate mistakes, it’s about having a strategy in place to do the right things for the customer when the blooper happens.

The serious ones have a value statement that goes something like this:
“We will do our best to prevent making a customer OOPS! but when we do, recovery will be our #1 priority.”

#2. Measure your recovery effectiveness — After recovery, ask the customer how you did. You can use all the internal metrics at your disposal, but in the final analysis it’s about how the customer felt about your actions.

Perception is reality, so take action from their feelings regardless if your own tracking says you did an ok job.

#3. Empower people — Speed requires a flat organization structure devoid of the need to escalate action for approval.

OOPS! recovery success is inversely related to bureaucracy: the more bureaucracy involved in making decisions, the longer it takes to take action and the recovery window closes. And you’ve lost the opportunity the screwup presented.

So if you’re serious, you have to empower people to do things to recover without the need to ask anyone for approval (the recovery plan will of course have guidelines to follow but that’s all they are - guidelines).

This is where leaders must step up and declare that they trust that people will do the right thing for both the customer and the organization, and that in recovery mode the organization structure is virtually flat and that an all-out assault on the OOPS! is to be supported by everyone who touches it.

#4. Provide superlative support to the frontline — Frontline people are lynchpins in the OOPS! chain, from when things go bad until recovery is complete.

If frontline people are not supported by authority to command the rest of the organization into action with the tools they need, your recovery plan goes south. Make sure your plan has the investments with the necessary leadership trust to give you a fighting chance to win every OOPS! event.

To make your organization OOPS! resistant, do the best you can to avoid making a blunder (which people expect you to do) but make sure you add the special ingredient—‘recovery sauce’—to recover memorably when you do.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

‘Audacious’ is my latest…

• Posted 3.14.22 at 06:10 am by Roy Osing
• Permalink

March 5, 2022

Audacious ‘Unheard-of Ways’ is here. NOW! Get your e-copy!

Audacious ‘Unheard-of Ways’ is here NOW. Get your e-copy!

“Whether your business is a start-up, or amongst the Fortune 500, Roy’s audacity and expertise will help you drive innovation, build a customer-centric culture and fuel success within an increasingly competitive and dynamic landscape.” — Darren Entwistle, President and CEO TELUS Corp. Vancouver Canada

The printed version of my new book—Audacious and ‘Unheard-of Ways’ I Took a Startup to A BILLION IN SALES—will be in bookstores everywhere on May 31, 2022.

But you don’t have to wait that long to learn what I did to grow a startup to A BILLION IN SALES.

My e-book—e-Audacious—is available at your favourite e-retailers NOW!

Apple Books

Barnes & Noble

Kobo

Google Books

Please grab your download and I would really appreciate your personal review.

Thanks very much.

Cheers,
Roy

Source: Unsplash

Here’s what others are saying about ‘Audacious’…

“Throughout his book, Roy provides pivotal marketing secrets and tips that enabled him to achieve his audacious goals, and to make you hungry to do the same.” — Frank Palmer, Vancouver Canada

“I’m a student of Roy’s work, but ‘Audacious and Unheard-of Ways’ is a superlative piece of ‘how-to’ work that goes beyond the limits of providing useful advice to businesses and career professionals; it surpassed my expectations.” — Bradley Hale, Toronto Canada

“With this book, he turns textbook leadership on its head with creative, out-of-the-box solutions to the biggest problems in business: aligning strategy and execution, motivating employees, and selling in turbulent times.” — Rick Spence, Toronto Canada

“The Audacious ‘Unheard-of Ways’ I Took a Startup to a Billion in Sales is a must-read for anyone looking to advance their career or business.” — Jill Schnarr, Vancouver Canada

“Once in a while the opportunity comes along to experience deep learning from someone who has actually achieved what we are attempting to do. This book is your opportunity.” — Ron Cox, Tampa Florida

“In ‘Audacious Unheard-of Ways’ he shares his advice and guidance which you will not get from anyone else but Roy. An amazing read with so many valuable lessons.” — Egon de Haas, Amsterdam The Netherlands

“Roy tells it like it is. No esoteric prose, just plain, practical advice that can be immediately implemented. You deserve to be a great leader, have a great career, sell as much as you can and Roy lays out the path how to achieve this and more”. — John Golden, PipePacific Palisades California

“Roy does an excellent job relating how customers are treated to growing a business.” — Nerio Vakil, Mumbai India

“If you are a small business owner and you really want to differentiate yourself to achieve better results Roy tells you how.” — Daniel Boisvert, Delta Canada

• Posted 3.5.22 at 06:28 am by Roy Osing
• Permalink