Vine vs Instagram

1. Longevity

Whilst this is admittedly a minor issue as far as Internet technology is concerned and is less important than user numbers, it does have some relevance to potential advertisers. Vine, launched on January 24th 2013 has the edge here. Although Instagram has been around since October 2010, it has only been possible to post videos on the platform since June 20th 2013. This means that Vine users are more familiar with the format and may therefore be more receptive to short creative marketing videos.

2. User numbers

Instagram is the clear winner in this category, with over 150 million active users although most of these users were acquired before video was introduced and owe more to its origins as a photo sharing platform. Vine has 40 million users.

3. Activity

Things begin to look a little worse for Vine in this category. Whilst you would naturally expect more active users to translate into more activity, it is not a linear function as far as tweets are concerned. Instagram has a 6 to 1 lead over Vine in terms of tweets, compared to a user number ratio of roughly 3.75. However, these figures do not tell the whole story as outlined in the next section.

4. Functionality

Vine videos are more visible in the Twitter community owing to the fact that they are previewed in the iPhone and Android Twitter apps. This means that all users need to do to view the content is to tap on the Vine video preview in Twitter. Whilst Instagram content can be tweeted, the lack of a visual preview means that it has less immediate impact.

5. Format

Vine videos are limited to 6 seconds whereas Instagram ones can be up to 15 seconds in length. There is no clear winner in this category but the different lengths mean that one platform may be more suitable than the other for different marketing techniques. If, for example, you wish to create a more conventional advertisement for distribution online, Instagram’s longer format will probably be the best choice. On the other hand, the 6-second format that Vine employs has encouraged advertisers to be more creative and there are many excellent examples of how it can be used to great effect.

6. Making a choice

Now you know a little more about what each platform has to offer, you should be in a better position to make an informed decision when planning new online video marketing campaigns. It is important to remember that whichever platform you choose, you need to have a team in place to answer the consumer enquiries that your promotional clip generates.

The following summary may be of some help if you need a quick reference when making a final decision.

Winners

• Longevity – Vine
• User numbers – Instagram
• Activity – Instagram
• Functionality – Vine
• Format – a draw

Whilst I have attempted to remain objective throughout this review, please bear in mind that personal preferences always influence one’s opinions and your experiences with these platforms are unlikely to be identical to mine. In closing, I firmly believe that both are useful weapons to keep in your marketing arsenal.

This guest post was written by Juliet Martin who is an Instagram user by preference. She also writes on behalf of Regus, a global provider of flexible office spaces and business solutions.

Do you want to incorporate Vine or Instagram into your Content Marketing strategy? Give us a call on +44 845 2264 247 or email us via mail@marketingfundamentals.com to start the conversation.

We hope you have found this information useful. You may also like this, Is it time to Vine?  and Which Brands are Winning on Vine? – 5 Brands that ‘Do it For The Vine’

Best regards,

Marketing Fundamentals Team

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Negotiation Tactics – Top 5 from Self-made Millionaires

1. Knock out the competition
Steve Jobs was a genius, and his negotiation strategy is probably the most unbelievable of them all. His tactic was to come up with offers that no other competitor could render. That’s exactly what happened when he wanted Lala (the future iTunes). Nokia offered $11 million for the startup, so Jobs took a piece of paper, gave it to the CEO, and the deal was closed. The amount was $80 million.

2. Play mind games
When Donald Trump chooses to take someone’s business, he arms himself with a couple of really good tricks prior to entering a negotiation. He knows all about playing mind games, so he spends hours chatting in the friendliest way possible. His counterparts will assume he’s just being a nice guy, but his goal is to find a weak spot and have the upper hand.

3. Leaving investors and lawyers at the door
Facebook CEO and multi-millionaire Mark Zuckerberg likes to acquire a start-up without consulting with his advisors. In 2012, Facebook agreed to a deal with Instagram worth $1 billion. He didn’t want to consult with his lawyers, and he closed the deal while eating ice cream with Kevin Systrom, CEO of Instagram. The deal was signed in a day and nobody knew anything about it.

4. If there’s no cooperation, end the whole thing
The moment Dick Costolo became Twitter’s CEO he had to deal with a dysfunctional board of directors, among numerous other things. Rather than accept unprofessional people on his team, he leveraged his power and fired everyone. He managed to demonstrate that Twitter was his company, and that the people who can’t play by his rules should go home.

5. Don’t forget that you have something they don’t
Jeremy Stoppelman, CEO and founder of Yelp, managed to stay very calm when Yahoo and Google mentioned they want to buy his review business. He told Fast Company that the negotiation didn’t live up to his expectations, and that both Yahoo and Google only wanted to know the worth of his company. So he turned them down.

Negotiations are challenging even for the richest people on the planet. However, they’re done differently as money is not the only incentive a seller wants from a buyer. Their negotiation tactics are all about maintaining their names on the floating line.

Need help with your negotiation strategy? Give us a call on +44 845 2264 247 or email us via mail@marketingfundamentals.com to start the conversation. We are a leading Marketing Agency in London.

We hope you have found this information inspirational.This guest post was written by Jason Philips of The Gap Partnership .

Best regards,

Marketing Fundamentals Team

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Improving Productivity – 4 ways through sports participation

1. Maximise Your Potential
It’s no surprise that many of the most successful entrepreneurs invest in having a healthy body and mind. They know that being fit and active puts us in optimal shape to make the best possible decisions. It is through sport that we challenge ourselves to grow and develop, training ourselves to maximise our potential.

2. Explore Comfort Zones
When hiring, entrepreneurs look for employees who have taken part, and particularly excelled, in any given sport. Why? It is when we push ourselves outside of our comfort zones to overcome obstacles in the pursuit of our goals that we achieve greatness. In sport, there are regular obstacles to overcome; you might get knocked down, lose the game, experience fatigue or be caught in adverse weather conditions. Sport provides a perfect arena to practice the skills we need for business.

3. Drive, Focus, Commitment
Any sport whether undertaken as part of a team or solo requires commitment. To improve in sports, we need to apply focus and motivation to train hard. When it comes to training, consistency is key and consistency requires commitment. Who wouldn’t want a driven focused and committed person on their team? When these qualities are applied to business – the results will speak for themselves.

4. Boosts Activity
A sporty person is an active person. Someone who enjoys being active will find ways to indulge this desire by finding more to do at work. They won’t be happy with sitting still, in either the physical or the metaphorical sense. If you hire a graduate who was captain of the football team at University, he’ll be knocking on your door asking for more work.

Need help for improving productivity? Give us a call on +44 845 2264 247 or email us via mail@marketingfundamentals.com to start the conversation.

We hope you have found this information useful. This guest post was written by Sophie Radcliffe of Challengesophie.com . We are a leading Marketing Agency in London.

Best regards,

Marketing Fundamentals Team

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Later this person came back to us and explained that they wanted the post to be an advertisement for their client. Obviously we cannot run advertisements via the back door for this company’s clients in our blog. The options presented to this person were to run to a piece that retained editorial integrity or for them to purchase a paid for post. All of this highlights the fact that many do not understand what constitutes a guest post on a blog. Here’s what it is not.

* A guest post is not an advertisement for a company.

* A guest post is not reason to abandon normal editorial guidelines in order to mention a company.

So what is a guest post?

* A guest post provides readers of a blog with value added content in the same way that the regular posts do. The only difference being that the guest post is written by a guest author.

Rationale

A good guest post delivering great content will drive people to the guest author’s website link and establish a useful backlink or ‘traffic source’ to use Google Analytics terminology. It will also build the reputation and profile of the guest author.

We are still happy to receive guest post submissions providing they deliver value added content – this could relate to some new innovative technology or range of services. It is possible to secure a link to a company or individual providing it is relevant and of interest to our audience.

Feel free to contact us via mail@marketingfundamentals.com with your guest post or give us a call on +44 (0) 845 2264 247 to discuss this or any aspect of your marketing requirements.

We hope you have found this information useful.

Best regards,

Marketing Fundamentals Team

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PPC Campaign Optimization – Step by Step Process

1. Keyword Configuration – First we have to work with our keyword configuration. We do advise you to keep in mind the Long Tail during the whole process. It is very important to categorize properly all your keywords, as well as to use broad phrases and exact bid in order to get the best results. But also we advice you to choose very carefully the negative keywords that you will include in your campaign. Remember to think constantly about the Quality Score.

2. Loving your ads – The second step for a top-notch PPC campaign optimization would be “loving your ads”. What do we mean? Well, you have to care about your ads. And how do we do it? It doesn’t matter if you have ad texts, banners or video ads, you should always contrast the CTR. At the same time, don’t use site links that are too generic. Users want relevance! It is important also to make use of dynamic keywords and ad groups. And, above all, there must be relevance between ads and keywords. The better you do, the better Quality Score you will achieve.

3. Ad Design – Next it’s time to put some effort in the design, layout and looks of your Adwords campaign. We live in a very visual world and in order to be more “clickable” our ads have to look good. It is time to design quality and conversion-focused landing pages, which will make them more attractive for users. If you do retargeting, try not to bother users too much. Then take a second and think carefully which are the best Calls to Action for each target.

4. Performance Monitoring – Last but not least you must analyze the performance of every PPC campaign you are working on. Monitor the CTR and CR to assure a good ROI, and analyze bounce rates and the load page time of your web and landing pages among many other things. All this work takes a great deal of time and effort in your PPC campaign optimization . Depending on the size of the campaign – it can take from hours to days.

Luckily, there are some PPC tools that can help you speed up the process saving time and losing no quality at all. We advise you to try out PPC DE tools, a pioneering online tool developed by Spanish online marketing agency Desmarkt that blends time optimization with quality in the creation of each PPC campaign. This tool makes it possible to create, organize and structure PPC accounts in an easy, quick and convenient way and succeeds in cutting down costs. You can complete in a few minutes a process that could take up at least one week of work.

This guest post was written by Patrícia Cuní. Do you need help with any aspect of your marketing? Feel free to give us a call on +44 (0) 845 226247 or drop us an email via mail@marketingfundamentals.com – We look forward to hearing from you.

We hope you have found this information useful.

Best regards,

Marketing Fundamentals Team

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The first stage of the recruitment process is straightforward – write a guest post of sufficient quality to be published on this website (without a lot of editing) and with the same target audience in mind – business owners and entrepreneurs.

Don’t delay as the time to act is now – Send your guest post to me via mike@marketingfundamentals.com If your guest post is successful you will be contacted with details of the next stage of the process and your guest post will be published on this site.

We look forward to reading your submissions.

Mike Pitt
Founder & CEO
Marketing Fundamentals Ltd

Business owners & entrepreneurs – If you would like to hear more about the Turbo Toolkit TM please give us a call on +44 (0) 845 226247 or drop me an an email via mike@marketingfundamentals.com
We look forward to hearing from you too.

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Follow these three simple steps to make sure your business makes the most of LinkedIn.

1. Call to Action

Start with an attention grabbing headline that tells users something about you – in your career summary create a call to action that makes it easy for people to get in touch with you or your company.

2. Form an Industry Specific Group

To provide yourself with the best chance of networking with the right people form a group that’s specific to the industry you work in. When you talk about issues that your specific group are interested in, you’re much more likely to illicit responses, which helps drive more traffic to your site and build your profile. Consider webinars and special events to attract more users to your group and increase your online presence.

3. Be Active

The more you use your LinkedIn account the more gravitas it will build. Take part in LinkedIn’s Questions and Answers but pick the things you decide to respond to strategically. You can use it as an opportunity to show off your skills but avoid pitching. Offer to make a quick call to discuss the problem and provide more detailed suggestions and at the end of the call you can then discuss your services and products.

Do you need to improve your marketing activities on LinkedIn? We would be happy to help you. Give us a call on +44 (0) 845 2264 247 or drop us an email via mail@marketingfundamentals.com – We look forward to hearing from you.

We hope you find this information useful.

Best regards,

Marketing Fundamentals Team
This guest post for the Marketing Fundamentals Team was written by John Hinds, Director of
Lojix Limited

The post Business growth – 3 ways to generate sales from LinkedIn without advertising appeared first on Marketing Fundamentals.

However, if women can’t access the cash they need, they can’t even get started. Whether the barriers to getting funds are real or imagined, the problem is most women believe they exist, and therefore may not even try to get the bank loan or grant which could launch their idea. How do we end this vicious cycle? Crowdfunding.

Crowdfunding for Women

Crowdfunding is an innovative new method of funding, and it’s revolutionising finance with a simple core concept – tell everyone about your great idea and ask for money in return for a reward. It’s as easy as that. Well this is great news for everyone of course, but for women in particular because it removes any bias, and allows women the same chance to pitch their ideas.

In fact, at Bloom VC we’ve found our female owned projects are actually much more successful than their male counterparts, and are more comfortable engaging and interacting with their community. (Ed – based on your projects completed so far) Maybe this personal relationship comes more naturally to us girls, after all we are the more touchy feely gender!

Hannah Stansfield is one such example, as she has funded not one but two successful projects with Bloom, Feeding Dahab’s Dogs and The Saddle Pad Project, both of which were for charity, to protect animals in Egypt. Hannah found it difficult to raise money previously, as she had tried donation drives through Facebook and the website, and a PayPal widget, but they didn’t appear to be getting the message across. She says crowdfunding has allowed her to explain her project clearly, and to a much wider audience, which has allowed her to raise more that she thought possible in a short space of time.

Jessica McDermott has recently closed her project successfully – all she needed was £500 to fund her comedy club exhibition ‘You Must Love Working Here’. While she had considered applying for grants through bodies such as creative Scotland, she felt it was risky to sit about waiting for her application to be processed. The great thing about crowdfunding for Jessica, was she was able to clearly see how much she had raised and how long she had left to go.

It’s amazing to see how far some of our project owners have come since their crowdfunding campaign; Polly from Cake Cetera will be delivering her gorgeous cupcake bouquets nationwide in the Spring, and Mhairi from Bonnie Bling was able to go full-time in her acrylic jewellery business after crowdfunding more than £8000. She has also hired part-time employees and enjoyed massive success as celebs such as Olly Murs, Sir Elton John and Tallia Storm have worn her jewellery.

As today is International Women’s Day Bloom VC wanted to celebrate our strong female project owners who are breaking the mould, and encourage more women to join the crowdfunding revolution! With that in mind, we’ve announced a no commission offer for any female owned projects launched on the 8th, and have much more planned to mark this important date. Check out our activity on Facebook and Twitter, and our IWD page.

Are you considering crowdfunding? If you are our website is a great place to start.

We hope you find this information useful.

Best regards,

Marketing Fundamentals Team
This guest post for the Marketing Fundamentals Team was written by Cara Pleym of Bloom VC

Marketing Fundamentals Ltd’s contact details – If you’d like to discuss any aspect of your marketing requirements feel free to give us a call on +44 (0) 845 226247 or drop us an email via mail@marketingfundamentals.com – We look forward to hearing from you.

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