How To Encourage Customers To Buy Your Products

As a producer, you need to be passionate about the process of making sales. It is not enough that you have a great product; you also need to ensure that you find out how to make sales. You need to figure out creative ways to reach out to the people that will purchase your product. To do this properly, you need to ensure that you know your customers then subsequently figure out what they need and meet their needs. In this article, we will go through practical tips and clues that can help you to increase sales effectively.

Below are things that you can do to encourage your customers to buy your product;

Make them feel special

Many brands make the mistake of over-pushing their products.  Doing this could bore your potential customers and make it seem like your business is not concerned about them. This is why you need to ensure that you make your customers feel special. Show that you understand their needs and work overtime to ensure that you satisfy these needs consistently. Whether online or offline, you need to engage them and show sincere interest in them properly. To make your prospective customers, you need to ensure that you are friendly and you show genuine interest in meeting their needs.

Tell a story

Customers are more likely to remember your marketing effort if there is a story behind it. This is something that significant businesses around the world today have learned to leverage for improved sales. Your account can be used to inspire people and create an easily relatable brand identity. Stories are a robust connector that you can use to influence potential customers to try out your products. When you create a unique and compelling, then you will change people to purchase your products. There are several aspects of business/production process that can influence customers. These aspects can be used to tell compelling stories that will help you stand out from the competition.

Leverage trust

Humans would instead make purchases from people that they trust. The most prominent businesses in the world today are those that have been able to endear themselves to customers. This is possible if you can maintain a reputation for reliable delivery of your promises. This is a great way to build credibility and get your customers to trust you. When you consistently practice techniques that build trust, then you will keep customers and also gain referrals. Customers expect value from products of trusted brands, and they feel valued when you meet their expectation.

Offer information

Information is the currency when it comes to building a stellar relationship with prospective customers. In today’s digital world, customers often look for important information. When you offer customers valuable information related to your niche, you will improve engagements and eventually improve sales. You can enhance the visibility of your brand by educating people about things related to your market/niche, as well as details about your product. This is a compelling way to show your customers the value that your products offer users.

Go the extra mile

Another great way to encourage customers to buy your product is by doing more than what customers expect. You can build positive emotions around your business by providing bonuses. Prospective customers connect strongly to your brand when you offer more than they anticipate. There is a high chance that your brand will not be forgotten in a rush when you provide extras. By doing this, you can effectively distinguish yourself from your competitors and encourage customers to buy from you.

Be reachable

Customers are more likely to make purchases when your business is consistently reachable. This is why you need to ensure that you are available to attend to questions, complains, or feedback from (potential) customers. The best way to do this is by ensuring that you provide contact details as well as suitable time-frames. Although staying in touch with your potential clients is not an easy task, it is a great way to improve trust.  

Choose the right medium

It is crucial if you want to effectively reach out to your target audiences and make consistent sales. There are several ways of reaching out to prospective customers with valuable content. Whether audio, photos, or motion graphics, you need to ensure that you use a more effective medium (depending on your target audience).

Various researches have continuously proven that visual content is the most effective kind of material to use. Visuals are great because prospective customers are more likely to pay attention to lines and colors before words. Visuals can be used to encourage customers to fall in love with your brand as well as products.  

Vdeesign provides video templates for all kinds of sales/marketing campaign. You can use these tools for all types of promotions as well as interactive content that will boost sales. Both free and paid templates are designed for businesses across all sectors.       

Conclusion

The process of making purchases is often an emotional one, and customers are more likely to make purchases from a business that they can trust. Customers never buy products merely because of their features. They are concerned with the benefits and the value that they tend to gain from the product.

When it comes to making sales, an essential factor is to ensure the quality of your product. Without this, all other steps taken to improve sales may not produce substantial results. However, if you can ensure that you practice the tips mentioned above, then you will see amazing results. 

Don't focus too much on selling the product. Instead, you should focus on the benefits/value that the products provided. Always remember that there are alternatives for your prospective customers. Therefore, you need to influence their decision in your favor by taking proactive steps to stand out from the rest. By incorporating these practices into your business, you can encourage customers to select your product.

To increase sales, you need to understand how to appeal to your audience emotionally effectively. When you look deeper into the world of businesses, then you will out that several factors are involved in making sales. If you consistently practice these tips, then you will significantly boost your sales volume.

8 Invaluable Online Typography Tools

Make your typographic life easier with these online tools.

Typography is one of those creative disciplines that may look straightforward to the outsider, but which is very easy to get horribly wrong. You can go a long way towards improving your type skills by ingesting a few good typography tutorials, but even seasoned typographers can use a little help every now and then.

Luckily there are some fantastic sites out there that can make working with typography that little bit less demanding, and we've found eight of the best. Whether you want simple ways to identify and manage fonts, tools for building your own fonts or just a little typographic inspiration, there's something for you here.

01. Wordmark

See all your installed fonts on a single web page

(Image credit: Wordmark)

While it's lovely to have a huge font collection, there comes a point where you have so many fonts that you can never be sure you're picking the right one for a project. With Wordmark, though, you can see every font you have installed on a single page; simply enter some text and off it goes, enabling you to quickly scan through and find the best looker. 

By default, it'll just find your system fonts, but if you install its Chrome extension it'll find everything else. There's also a Pro version for a very reasonable $2/month, that adds tagging, a dark mode, Google fonts functionality and much more.

02. WhatTheFont

Our favorite destination for identifying fonts

(Image credit: MyFonts)

There are few things more annoying than seeing a beautiful font somewhere and not being able to identify it. With WhatTheFont from MyFonts you're in with a decent chance, though. 

It's long been a favorite of ours; if there's a bit of type you want to identify, simply grab an image of it and upload it, then highlight the text you're interested in and WhatTheFont will come up with a list of the nearest matches in MyFonts' massive library. It's not foolproof, but it's close enough.

03. Emotype

Convey the mood you need with these curated fonts

(Image credit: Emotype)

Typography can be an excellent tool for conveying moods and emotions, and if you want a shortcut to finding the right fonts to evoke a certain emotion then pay a visit to Emotype. It features a small but useful set of carefully-curated typefaces that are grouped by emotions, enabling you to quickly find the fonts that'll suit the mood of the piece you're working on. 

Right now it's showcasing fonts that are suitable if you want to appear confident, welcoming, unique or neutral; check back in future for other typographic moods.

04. Prototypo

Build your own unique font in minutes

(Image credit: Prototypo)

If you've ever fancied designing your own font but don't know where to start, here's a free and easy solution. Prototypo uses parametric fonts – similar to variable fonts – and provides five of them designed by Production Type that you can adjust to create your ideal look. 

Sliders enable you to change parameters such as thickness, width and serif width across the entire font, and once you're happy with the general look of your font you can refine individual characters before exporting to use wherever you want.

05. FontStruct

A more in-depth font building tool

(Image credit: Fontstruct)

Want to get more in-depth with font design? FontStruct is a free online font-building tool that enables you to create fonts – or 'FontStructions' – using geometric shapes in the FontStructor editor. 

Once you're done it'll turn your work into a TrueType font that you can download and use in any applications; there's also a galley of fonts where you can share your work and see other users' creations that you can clone to make your own variations.

06. Archetype

Sort out your web typography with this handy tool

(Image credit: Archetype)

For web designers wanting to create great-looking sites with consistent and harmonious typography, Archetype is a potential life-saver.

It takes the guesswork out of web typography with a three-step system in which you choose a visually compatible font pair, defines the sizes for all the typographic elements you might need, and set the optimal vertical spacing. After a bit of final tweaking and refinement you can export a CSS file to hand over to the developers; easy!

07. Discover.typography

Get some typography tips and inspiration from Hoefler&Co

(Image credit: Hoefler&Co)

Want some typographic inspiration? Discover.typography from Hoefler&Co is a resource that you'll definitely want to bookmark. It features a stack of inspiring visual compositions build around different themes such as mobile interfaces and the typography of intrigue, which you can zoom in on and explore to see spot-on type combinations and useful tips. And if you spot a font that you like the look of while you're exploring, simply mouse over it to learn what it is and maybe buy it.

08. Fontface Ninja

An essential tool for identifying fonts on the web

(Image credit: Fontface Ninja)

Another brilliant tool for helping you to identify fonts that you like the look of, Fontface Ninja is a free browser extension that makes it easy to inspect fonts on any website. 

Once it's installed you can find the name of any fonts by hovering over them; it'll also give you information on size, letter spacing, line height, and color. You can click on the font to try it out for yourself, and if it's one you want to add to your collection then Fontface Ninja can also provide you with a price and a link to buy it (if it's a free font then it'll give you a download link).

This article was originally published by Jim McCauley on the Creative Bloq.

Why After Effects Templates Are The Best In Its Class?

One debate that has gained significant popularity in recent times is the faceoff between those that support after effects templates to those that don’t. Often, the debate lies in the originality of after effect templates and whether they can be compared to the works of "real designers". This is false due to the fact that after-effects templates brings ease to the process of designing. It is an amazing resource for customizing projects and making them appear highly professional. In this article, we will take a critical and succinct view of what after effects templates are. By the time you are done reading this article, you will have a comprehensive understanding of after effects templates.

What is after effects?

An after-effects template is a video or an animated project file that has design elements that allow you to represent ideas with your artistry. These templates are crafted by professionals to ease up the process of making quality visual projects.  This is a tool that is used to enhance videos with titles, intros, as well as, (seamless) transitions in motion graphics. To use this tool, you simply need a copy of the adobe after effects software on your laptop or desktop computer. After effects (A.E from hereon) is a program that reaches incredible depths, however, it is also highly approachable and easy to use. This is why this is a preferred tool for users in various industries for quality visual representation.   

With after effects, you can do a lot more than mere editing parts of your clip. It provides elements with which users can animate elements from scratch. After effects templates are designed to make it easy for users to change colors, text, layout, as well as, designs.

How do I use after effects templates?

All these can be done with little or no understanding of the structures that professional graphics designers understand. With drag and drop features, users can skip the complexity of the process and create amazing visual content. While some after effects templates are used to create entire finished videos, others are used to include graphics to already existing videos.

There are many features that users can get access to as a result of a vast array of unique depth effects. Users can also use bend, curve, and other amazing features to blur the line between video and reality. With after effects, the expressions of your mind can be made valid and subsequently used to communicate effectively.

To use an after effects template, you need to have the after-effects software on your computer. In recent times, some many more platforms and websites offer a wide range of after effects templates. Therefore, if you are hesitant to download the software, you can choose from tons of options online.

By using an after effects template, you can easily add a professional flair to your video projects. Most templates come with a set of clear instructions that will give you a rundown of all you need to do.

Benefits of After Effects Templates

If you have not tried an after effects template yet then I will give you several reasons why you should consider them.

1. Saves money and time

When compared to the costs of starting and finishing a project from scratch, after effects templates by far were the better options. With inexpensive preset templates, users can save money, as well as, time. This tool can help you to save a lot of effort while maintaining the same amazing result.

2. Provides a wide range of unlimited options

The template market has become significantly bigger in recent years. This is because of the constant rise in the demand for after effects templates. Due to this fact, there are numerous options to choose from in terms of templates as well as providers of templates. As long as you know what works for your production goal, you can easily pick from the pool of available options.

3. An easy introduction

Unlike many complex tools, after effects offers an easy introduction to the motion design. Templates provide the right platform to effectively learn and master the basics of design.

4. Production quality goes all the way up!

Amp up the production value of your visuals by using these professionally designed tools. The quality of templates can be easily attributed to the effort and artistry that goes into their production. With templates, you can have highly polished and professional videos for all purposes.  

5. Be unique and creative

Templates are amazing because they offer numerous customization options that help users to create unique visual content. You can stand out from the crowd with creative and original video content. Many people wrongly assume that templates stifle creativity when in fact; it helps users to explore more options.

6. Stay trendy

 Motion design is a field that is growing rapidly and there is a need to keep up with trends. There are several styles and it is important to stay up-to-speed with the new styles to create effective visuals. With after effects templates, users can experiment with the latest styles and reach out effectively with motion graphics.

I hope I have been able to convince you about the amazing world of benefits that awaits users of after effects templates. There are several options to pick from and each of them offers a unique set of amazing after effect templates.

Conclusion

Videos have become a crucial part of any business’ design and marketing strategy. If you are not working with videos then you are missing on a lot. With after effects, you can take your visual projects to another level with the use of overlays, lower thirds, logo reveals, sequences and many more.

It is also a great option because not only does it speed up the process; it helps you to produce quality content in real-time. Vdeesign provides a wide range of after effects templates that will immensely help your business. These templates are professionally designed for all purposes and can be used to produce quality visuals in real-time. If you wish to take your business to the next level then you need after effects templates.

A Step-By-Step Guide To Marketing Your Mobile App

According to Statista, there were about 205 billion mobile app downloads in 2016. This shows you how large the mobile application market has gotten.  These days, tons of mobile apps do a wide range of things and, amazingly, every application has a long list of competing apps that offer the same value. The number of mobile app downloads has grown by more than 20% in the past 3 years. This shows that there are several opportunities for developers to showcase their best hands and produce valuable mobile applications. However, having a great app is just one step of the journey because you also need to ensure that you properly market your application. In this article, we will go through a step-by-step process of effectively marketing your app with a focus on video marketing.

What comes first?

For every mobile app that becomes a bestseller, there is a process that leads up to the point where the app is sold out. Before you decide to market your app, you need to ensure that you conduct market research (competitive analysis). This is necessary because it is very likely that your application has some existing competition in the market. This analysis will help you make comparisons and this will ultimately help you to deliver a perfect app.

Another reason why this needs to be done is that it helps you find your ideal customers. This is important because it will help you to focus on the specific people that need the value that your app offers. When you can envision your ideal/average user then you can go on to find out the best way to market to them. After this is done, then you can easily create the right marketing messages that will lead to conversions.

The importance of social media

The importance of social media in today’s digital world is immense and this is why it is critical for app promotion. Whether you are trying to gain people’s attention through paid or organic connection, social media can help you get across to potential users.

Social media promotion is a no-brainer because most of your potential users are already on these platforms with their devices. Therefore it is easier to get them to download your applications with a few clicks. To effectively market your mobile application, you need to device a useful social media strategy. For social media to work, you need to find ways to get the attention of your audience  

Communicate effectively

After the development of your app, you need to figure out how you will tell people about your product. Trying to sell an app is somewhat similar to trying to sell a product in real life. Just like a real product, the availability of your app does not result in sales. No matter how great your app is, no one will know about it until you SHOW them the great features that your app has. Although Social media is a crucial tool, the content of your social media campaign is what truly matters. This is why you need to effectively communicate the benefits and unique features of your mobile app to prospective users. The best way to do this is through the use of video content.

Why videos?

A strong visual theme is one of the most effective and inexpensive ways to communicate. When done correctly, videos can make the difference between a great marketing effort and a failed one.

Videos are a great way to promote your brand and register a positive feeling about your company. These days, most video ads are done to promote the positive image of brands. With videos, you can promote positive feelings in users and subsequently influence them to download your application.

Emotions play a crucial role when it comes to the human decision-making process. Videos are a great way to evoke emotions in users. By creatively outlining your video with visually appealing content (the kind that your target audiences would like), you can begin a process of emotional investment. Everyone that comes across your video will have some kind of reaction. Video is the best tool to use to get a positive reaction from your prospective users.

Actions indeed speak louder and this is the goal for video marketing. With videos, you can have a call to action and drive users to the store where they can find your app. Videos help you to connect to your audiences in a clear and precise manner. Trust is the foundation of sales and with videos; you can build and maintain a great level of trust with prospective users.

Tested and Trusted

Viewers often have a short attention span; this is why you need to ensure that you grab their attention at first glance. With quality imagery and the proper use of motion picture, you can get them to preview the wonderful features that your application offers.

What is the best way to advertise your mobile application with quality visuals?

The following products have been designed for that exact purpose. Vdeesign is a group of professional artists, designers and animators that create amazing templates. These templates can be used to effectively market your mobile application in real-time. They are not only easy to use; they also offer extensive customization options. Users can customize colours, texts, designs, and duration to fit with personal preferences. Also, these templates come with extensive tutorials that help users to master the ropes and create video content that will lead to conversion. Let’s take a look;

1.  App Store Preview Promo: https://videohive.net/item/app-store-preview-promo/24007222

This promo is made up of several short videos with which you can show users realistic demos of your app in action. With a long list of templates that are less than 30 seconds, users can discover and learn about your app with realistic demos.

2. Sleek 3D Phone App Trailer: https://videohive.net/item/sleek-3d-phone-app-trailer/22300212

This is not just your typical explainer video template; it is a professional presentation that is built according to industry standards. If you would love to tell the world about your app using 3 dimensional pre-rendered sequences then this set of templates are for you. It is useful for a variety of content and can be used across various niches.

3. Phone X App Hype:  https://videohive.net/item/phone-x-app-hype/21188172

Your apps big revealing can be made bigger and better with these set of templates. The designs for these templates are bold, dynamic and supercharged with energy. If your app is targeted at millennials then you need a cool way to go about marketing it. This set of templates redefines the term ‘cool’.

4. Phone App Promo Kit:  https://videohive.net/item/phone-app-promo-kit/20337711

This kit is designed to promote mobile application projects on any level. It is the ideal tool for you to explain, promote, and showcase the unique features of your mobile app. You can also take advantage of the hand gestures and capture the most important details of your app with this tool. This tool provides you with a sleek, elegant and highly inspiring way to share the content of your app.

How To Represent Your Idea

If you ever start to doubt the importance of ideas, then I have a question for you. Do you know that everything you see (brands, buildings, countries, sports, and everything you can visualize) were once ideas? If Jeff Bezos never made certain moves, Amazon may be just another document on Jeff's floppy disk’ at that time.

Ideas are highly important because they often relay an image that influences action. This is why there is a need to effectively represent Ideas. In this article, we will take a look at some of the best ways to express ideas in.

The importance of visuals in presenting ideas

Without an iota of doubt, visuals remain one of the strongest ways to reflect an idea. With visuals, you can appeal to the minds of people who can easily process the information therein. Little wonder why visual communication is actively growing amongst businesses today. About 8 out of every 10 business rely on visuals (Images, videos, animations, and so on) to effectively pass information across.

The human mind processes things in terms of images and the human brain can process images quickly. Texts are the last things that human beings process and this is why catchy photos are everywhere. Humans respond quickly to videos and make decisions based on visuals. This is why images and graphics need to be at the core of your branding efforts.

Still doubting the importance of visualization on ideas? Below are reasons why visuals are more important than texts when it comes to representing your ideas and getting the best results;

1. With visuals, time is saved because visual signals are 60,000 times than texts. This is why visuals are highly beneficial and effective.

2. It is best when ideas are presented and understood. With visuals, you can pass information across.

3. Also, with visuals, you can be sure that information will be better retained by those who view it. When things are heard or read they are not retained in the memory as long as images.

4. Visuals are pretty simple for anyone to comprehend and understand the idea that is being portrayed.

5. Also, visuals are very flexible because they go beyond language and express ideas to people from vast cultures.

Animation and motion graphics

With the digitalization of virtually everything that we do as humans, motion graphics and animation shave become much more popular. Whether you are checking out websites or simply going through social media, you will find clear evidence of folks trying to reach potential customers through these means.

Creativity is a huge plus when it comes to uniquely representing your ideas. This is possible with the use of animation and it helps you to pay attention to important details that characterize your idea. With the use of animation and motion graphics, you can express your ideas without any limits. Also, with the use of motion graphics, you can effectively attract the attention of viewers and get your ideas out there.

In terms of cost, animation costs way less than normal videos. Today, users can make use of animated templates and create amazing videos on the go.

Tips on effectively representing ideas

No matter how good an idea may be, it cannot sell itself. This is why it is important for you to effectively sell ideas with proper representation.  Whether you are trying to sell an idea to your supervisor at work or the lecturers in school or to the regular internet user, it is important to effectively represent ideas.

To use visuals effectively, you need to take note of the following KEY tips.

1  Know your audience

For every idea that you are trying to represent, there is an audience who you hope to influence in one way or another. When you know as much as possible about the people to whom you are presenting your idea then you will learn how to effectively represent ideas to them. When you know some crucial factors about your target audience such as their age, location, social and ideological dispositions and so on then you can effectively influence them with your ideas.

2. Perfection is a myth

A lot of times, we find ourselves trying to attain a particular level of perfection. This often reduces productivity because it causes you to focus on flaws and waste precious time. When it comes to representing ideas effectively, you need to ignore the idea of perfection because nothing is 100% perfect. To effectively pass across your ideas to audiences, you need to ensure that you do not go around looking for perfection.

3. Brainstorm

To effectively pass across the information you need to take out time to brainstorm. This simply means that you think of creative ways to present your ideas uniquely. During the process of brainstorming, you are more likely to find inspiration. Ideas (and their subsequent representation) indeed take time. This is why you need to take out ample time and focus on creating the best possible representation for your ideas. This way, you can consider all the “what ifs” and ‘what not”.

Rounding up…

Whether you are using videos, photos, gifs, animations or slideshows, it is important to know what your aim is. You need to be clear on what you aim to achieve with the idea before you start thinking of representing your idea to others. You need to ensure that you are 100% clear on your ideas.

You have to be genuine when representing ideas because your efforts may backfire if you over-promise and fail to deliver your promises. This is why you should keep it basic to ensure that you are not confusing audiences.

Ideas are valuable and even more valuable when you can effectively relay it to others with the use of creative elements. Brands are ideas in the mind of people and this significantly influences their actions and decisions. The goal of this article is to show individuals as well as organizations the importance of the proper representation of ideas.

When this is done properly then you will see amazing results. I hope you enjoyed reading this? Thank you for your time, cheers!

How Your Small Business Can Use Video Marketing To Increase Revenue

Startups and small businesses are facing more competition than ever before. Even if you have a unique idea, capturing the attention of potential customers so you can scale your business may seem like an impossible challenge.

Though there are many marketing tactics you could use to fuel the growth of your business, few prove more effective in today's digital age than nailing your video marketing strategy. This point really hit home for me when I interviewed Alex Brown, cofounder of the subscription beard care service, The Beard Club.

Thanks to some video marketing savvy, Brown’s company has generated over $10 million in revenue, while racking up hundreds of millions of views of their content on YouTube and Facebook. Your small business can also see significant growth if you employ video marketing the right way.

Communicating Your Value Proposition

One of the best reasons to use video marketing is because it helps communicate your company’s unique value proposition in a more engaging manner. As Brown explained, their most successful videos have been those which made people laugh but also did a good job highlighting what their products actually did.

For example, after launching a new hair growth product line, their team created a spoof of a stereotypical pharmaceutical commercial. “It’s a really funny commercial, and it got shared a lot because it was super funny,” Brown recalls. "It did really well as an acquisition tool because it communicated the benefits of the product—but in a really funny way. Those have been our best videos for both brand awareness and acquisition.”

This mentality drives the strategy behind each of his team’s video production strategy.

“We try to make people laugh and have a good time, which encourages them to share the video… and the more engagement a video has on Facebook, the more spend we can put behind it to help reach even more people.”

Moreover, the numbers back this idea up. An incredible 64% of online video viewers make a purchase after watching branded videos on social media—something that is sure to boost revenue if you can get enough viewers.

A Wide Range Of Tactics

Though funny commercials in the vein of The Beard Club can certainly prove beneficial, digital distribution has opened up even more ways for you to use video to spread the word about your business. I also had the opportunity to speak with Deyan Shkodrov, CEO of StreamingVideoProvider, to discuss some of the other ways small businesses can leverage video.

“Broadcasting live events is a fantastic way to not just spread awareness, but also increase your bottom line,” he explains. “For example, we worked with a company that needed to broadcast local sporting events—some of which would be available for free, some that would be available through a pay-per-view model. Strategic broadcasting ensured higher-than-expected audiences for their paid events. When live streams add value to the customer experience, they can boost your revenue in several ways.”

Many businesses may also benefit by providing educational video content. “You're an industry expert, so you should leverage that knowledge,” Shkodrov explains.

“Whether you’re teaching customers how to use your product or providing some life hacks, when you add value and showcase your knowledge, your audience will keep coming back for more. With the right setup, you could even further monetize your videos by creating low-priced educational courses.”

As these examples reveal, video marketing doesn’t just have to be a way to increase sales or customer signups indirectly. It can actually generate revenue in its own right.

Getting Started

“The heart and soul of our marketing and customer acquisition is great content. For us, it was a matter of getting those people on board,” Brown says. However, he recognizes that entering the world of video marketing can seem daunting for small business owners.

“It’s definitely tough when you’re starting out. It’s a question I get all the time. People ask how we initially afforded to hire a cameraman, video editor or an animator. Though that can be a challenge to navigate, there are lots of opportunities to find creative people that like working on commercials that would work for sweat equity and exposure. You just have to be really good at pitching your vision and having them get excited about what you're creating.”

Most importantly, you don’t actually need a big budget to get quality results. As Brown notes, freelancers, interns or even university students can help you craft quality content without the huge investments that would be required if you hired additional full-time staff.

Going viral doesn’t have to be your end goal, either. As Brown explains, “We’ve had videos that get millions of views but don’t produce a lot of sales. We’ve also had very low-budget commercials that were quickly done, yet have performed extremely well.”

The formula for success? It doesn’t lie in the budget. Brown’s team has shot videos for as little as $1,000 or $2,000. At the end of the day, success came down to educating customers about the product while also providing some level of entertainment. With the right people to form your creative team, a sound ROI didn’t depend on whether or not the video went viral.

The same basic formula can deliver equally desirable results for your business. Whether you’re selling an innovative product or providing a life-enhancing service, you need to find compelling ways to tell your story if you want to grow a strong, sustainable business. With the right techniques and high-quality production, video will deliver results that can seriously move the needle.

This post was written by Ryan Robinson.
Ryan writes about the creative ways millennials are making money. You can follow Ryan on Twitter or LinkedIn. or check out his website.

Tips for a Good Motion Graphics Production Workflow

Being an efficient and productive artist means you can provide a high quality, good value service to your clients.

And if your anything like me, the thought of pre-planning gives me visions of excel spreadsheets, and some time scheduling nonsense! But thats not always the case, especially with motion graphics and animation. The planning stages can be awesome

Spending some time in pre-production allows you to gain focus, develop ideas and get those creative juices flowing! (mmmm creative juices!!!)

So get used to planning a head, and I'm sure both you and the standard of your work will benefit, heres how -

Start with a storyboard 

As animators and  designers we need to realize the importance of starting the project with a storyboard.

Before you jump into After Effects and start aimlessly throwing key frames around , take a minute to put together some sketches and ideas on how the animation would flow.

You don't necessarily need to be Davinci, just good enough to think on paper, showing what happens and when.

I suck at drawing, but taking the time out to doodle the key stages of an animation with notes explaining camera moves, motions and anything else will really help you down the line.

Save time by adding this step to your workflow and you can avoid wasting time or going on a tangent to deliver something other than what you originally intend to create.

Not only that, but storyboards are a great resource for showing the client your thoughts and getting any editing done early on. 

The bottom line, storyboards save you time, improve your work and keep you on track.

Name your work files accordingly

A production consists of graphics, imagery, effects, audio files and any additional/explanatory text files blah, blah, blah.

You'd be a fool to dump all of these files in one folder (...Shut Up! I know I did it that one time I was swamped!) .

You need to separate your files into appropriate folders that make sense to you and anyone else.

I'd recommend going for the following folders as a basic set up:

Comps - Contains your After Effects or C4d Compositions saved in numbered versions

Assets - Your logos, graphics, illustrations and other bits and bobs for the project

Audio - Your music track, sound fx, and voice overs - feel free to further sub categorize of course!

Samples - A place to output your low res samples passed back and forth to your clients or team.

Output - A place to output your final renders, before sending off to your lovely clients

Now naming conventions, don't be a sucker, sucker! 

Awesome_Stuff/MotiongraphicsprojectFinal23withaudionewfinal01ohwhattheheckanotherchange__really!ok_final_output.aec is not an appropriate name for any project file.

Try to apply a few simple rules to make sure your project structure makes sense

My go to method is 

["Project name"]_["Shot Name"] (if applicable)["Version Number"]

eg.

AwesomeCatAnimation_FluffyWindowJump_v27

That's it, of course come up with your own conventions and please do post them in the comments below, I'd love to hear your suggestions.

The main thing is make sure it makes sense to what the project contains, and what version it is, no one likes any more unwanted surprises in AdobeAfter Effects - the stupid sheep error noise is bad enough! 

Pre-rendering

This is a great technique you may use time to time, After Effects tends to gobble ram up like the cookie monster eats cookies. Because of that things can get a little sluggish in bigger comps. Save time and avoid frustration by rendering out and re-importing any elements that are complete and no longer need adjusting (eg. Particular layers).

This technique can really help avoid getting frustrated down the line and ensure your project is moving as fast as possible.

To play it safe, just keep your original layer in the comp and hide it when you drop in the pre-render.

As an output format for pre-renders I'd recommend going for Quicktime Movies with png encoding, its visibly lossless and allows transparency so pretty darn helpful.

This article was originally published by Motion Stacks.

Why Templates Are Getting So Popular?

If you notice that the world of designs seems a little more colorful than it has ever been then you are a keen observer. More than ever before, designs in branding and marketing have become more accustomed to brighter colors. You tend to see a splash of colors such as vivid shades of blue or bright colors like yellow or orange. This trend that has been up for a couple of years has seen major brands such as Adidas and Apple Inc. make use of eccentric colors and designs.

No matter how amazing a product or service may be, it is important to market it efficiently. With the digitalization of things, brands can leverage simple and efficient ways of marketing. One of these simple ways is through the use of animated video templates.

Animations are important because they relate to the human mind more efficiently than all other kinds of visual content. The efficiency of video content makes it the best way to highlight key points to audiences. Animated videos have been said to be a great way to keep target audiences engaged and interested in the message that is being passed across.

Rise Of Templates

Now that we have ascertained the importance of quality visuals, the next thing is to take a look at how templates became so popular. Although, graphic designs have been popular for more than a decade, the last 5 years have seen a significant increase in its popularity. Whether you are using templates to create a new website or creating an identity for your brand, templates are great tools that provide users with a variety of customization options on ready-made designs.

The relevance of templates has also improved significantly because they provide users with the option of creating a website without the need to write codes. Today, many website builders are web-based and they come with a handful of features that allow users to utilize their wide range of tools. With these templates, users can add or remove design elements such as colors, lines, gradients, and so on.

Templates are crucial when it comes to the efficient management and marketing of brands with little (or no) cost. The amazing thing about templates is the fact that they can be used effectively by both tech geeks as well as newbies. With creative and intuitive designs and a wide range of elements for users to choose from, templates are perfect for branding. Templates also offer users several professional template designs as well as color schemes to select from.

With templates, brands can effectively promote their product, services, as well as ideas in a unique manner.

Why Are Templates Getting Increasingly Popular?

The popularity of templates can be said to be as a result of the several benefits that brand get as a result of using templates. Below are some reasons why templates are becoming increasingly popular;

• Templates are a great way to stand out

The first reason for the increased popularity of templates is simply because it is a great way for brands to stand out. With templates, brands can create a unique identity that will be used for various forms of digital marketing. The influence of digital marketing has improved competition and thus, the need for a unique style of representation.

• They improve the chances of conversions

Although it seems like an obvious reason, another reason for the increase in the use of templates is because it works. According to statistics, animated video content can increase the likelihood of sales by more than 70%. Therefore, no matter what product or service you are trying to sell; with templates, you can be sure to improve conversions.

• They are a great way to ensure engagement

Engagement is the most crucial part of digital marketing and with templates, brands can constantly interact with audiences. Engagement often precedes conversion and subsequent sales, therefore, it is important to actively engage users with stellar visual content. Templates are used to improve engaging content and this is another reason why templates have become more popular.

• Templates are great for SEO

Search engine optimization is a great way through which businesses can rank higher and become visible and accessible. In deciding which sites would rank higher, Google’s algorithm considers the time that visitors spend on the site. Animated templates have become increasingly popular since animated designs are a major reason why visitors stay on websites.

• Templates help you to be properly understood

Another major reason for the popularity of templates is because it helps you to effectively communicate your brand. With templates, you can help potential customers to grasp what you are selling. Brands can use templates to clearly state the purpose, functions and relevance of products and services. This is a great way to improve the level of trust that users have in a brand.

• Templates save resources

One of the most important characteristics of templates is the fact that they help brands to save both money and time, which are both crucial resources. With templates, brands can create quality visual content in real-time. When compared to the regular way of hiring a graphics designer, templates can be used to create content in less time and they cost significantly less than hiring professional designers.

Rounding up…

When it comes to marketing, businesses that use appealing visuals are known to edge those that don’t. Also, it is safe to say that businesses that use this means of marketing are bond to get great ROI (Returns on investment). Therefore the next question to ask is, “What are the best template options?”

As I mentioned earlier, these templates exist on the cloud and can be accessed online. In closing the article, we will take a look at some of the best templates that brands can use for effective marketing.

1. Wix: www.wix.com

Wix is a cloud based web-development platform based in Israel, the platform was made popular by Israeli company- wix. With this platform, users can create HTML5 websites, mobile sites, and so on with the use of online drag and drop tools.

2. Biteable: www.biteable.com

Founded in 2014, in Hobart Australia, Biteable is a video creating site where users can create all kinds of videos, ads, animations, and presentations, to name a few. It has both free and paid versions.

3. Vdeesign: www.vdeesign.com

Vdeesign is a collection of professional graphic artists, animators, and designers who provide top quality motion graphics templates. For Vdeesign, the goal is to provide pre-designed after effects templates to help brands grow, one of which is Instagram Stories Pack, among others.

4. Weebly: www.weebly.com

Weebly is a web-hosting service co-founded by 3 people (Dave Rusenko, Chris Fanini, and Dan Veltri) in 2006. The platform caters to the ecommerce needs of brands and they provide web platforms that make online shopping easy. Weebly is a subsidiary of Square inc. which currently has more than 45 million customers from around the world.

5. Wordpress: www.wordpress.com

Wordpress launched in August 2005 and subsequently opened to the public on the 21st of November 2005. It is a blogging platform that is owned and hosted online. With this platform, registered users can host blogs for free. As of 2017, wordpress had over 77 million monthly posts.

If you are a DIYer then you can go through instructional videos and start creating unique content for your brand. The process of using templates can be made simple when you invest enough time and capital on the right tools. With the digitalization of marketing (just like virtually everything else), the relevance of templates cannot be overstated.  

Color Correcting for Video: A Starter Guide

Color correcting has an incredible power to give films a polished, cinematic look. The difference between a cool, blue-ish tone of a film vs. a classic, grainy film aesthetic can really set the tone, and help you tell your story.

But color correction can be overwhelming! There are a lot of confusing tools, and it takes research and practice to correct images with advanced precision. The good news is that there are more tools—and more affordable tools—for color grading and color correction out there than ever before. 

It’s still a complex process, and if you have the budget to hire a professional colorist, you absolutely should! But this post is geared towards editors who are new to color correcting, and DIYing it. (If you’re new to editing generally, you should also check out our guide on  how to edit video for beginners).

We will not be focusing on a particular platform for this, because the fundamentals are the same even though the interfaces may be different. If you’d like to dive into the workflows for particular platforms, you can try C.M. De La Vega’s tutorial on Adobe’s Lumetri Color Tools, DaVinci’s robust reference manual, Apple’s Final Cut Pro X Color Correction Overview, or this tutorial on Color Correction in Avid Media Composer.

Color Correction vs. Color Grading

The terms Color Correction and Color Grading are sometimes used interchangeably, but they are not the same thing. Color Correction is adjusting your footage to look natural and consistent from shot to shot. On the other hand, color grading is using color to set the tone or add a specific atmosphere and style  into your project from beginning to end. First color correct and then color grade.

One practical use of Color Grading is “day for night” shooting a scene at day time and making it look like night in post production with the color grade among other techniques. Most simply, make the the scene a bit more dark and usually much more blue to accomplish this. One recent prominent example of this technique is the film Mad Max: Fury Road. You can read a break down of how they used color grading to achieve this in this FXGuide article. You can learn more about how they used color grading to highlight what was important in scenes for Fury Road in this interview with colorist Eric Whipp.

In this post, we’ll focus on color correcting, which lays the groundwork for color grading. Some projects may never involve color grading. For other projects, color grading is integral, but very dependent on the particular project and aesthetic goals of the creators. All tools that are used for color correction can also be used for color grading.

When to Start Color Correction

Color Correction should be one of the last parts of the editing process, alongside finalizing sound editing and mixing. Color correction is a long and involved process and it shouldn’t be done until your project has been picture locked. It’s a significant waste of time to adjust your footage before you’ve finalized what you are and aren’t using. Part of color correcting is getting your footage to look consistent from shot to shot, which you can’t do until you know all the shots you’re using in the project.

What is a Picture Profile?

When a camera records a scene, it collects data and translates that data into a viewable format. When it does this, it includes instructions on how to modify the data to try and more accurately recreate what you saw. That is a “picture profile”—the set of parameters that determine the characteristics of your footage. Popular picture profiles include ‘C-LOG/Cinestyle’ (Canon) or ‘S-Log’ (Sony). “RAW” is a popular option because it gives the most control over the image; but it also takes up space. Flat picture profiles are also popular, as they give ample flexibility to color and enhance your footage. You may also hear the term “log” which is a neutral profile. 

Working with Flat Footage

In all likelihood your project was shot with a “flat” profile, which is to say that the director of photography set the camera so that the final image from the camera never has areas that are totally white or totally black. Everything tone in the image at most rides just below peaking at white or just above falling into being totally black. This gives the image you import into your video editing software a slightly washed out look. Everything is just a little bit gray. There’s not strong contrast in the image. You have details in the highlights and in the shadows.

Flat footage ultimately gives you the most options for working with your footage in post production. You push the contrast in the tones in either direction without losing much in your video image quality. This can give you more from the color in your final product as well. 

As you spend long hours editing flat footage be aware that you may get used to how it looks. Over time the low contrast and washed out colors may seem normal. You look at it for so long that sometimes when you do your initial round of color correction, the results may seem extreme or strange when really you’re just bringing the tones to something more natural. Take a step back from the project briefly, if this happens to give yourself some perspective.

Trust Your Eyes, But Don’t Trust Your Monitor

Unless you’ve got a properly calibrated monitor, your results may vary working with color correction and getting the image to look natural. It can be difficult to trust your monitor in this case, because it may not be representing the color in a way that’s accurate for adjusting across other monitors and platforms the project may be seen on. 

You may not be able to trust your monitor, but you can still trust your eyes by leveraging tools in the platforms designed to represent the image you’re working with in mathematical terms. These tools are video scopes.hey’ll show you a representation of your image on a chart and the strength of the light or particular colors, dependent on the tool you’re working with.

Working with Video Scopes

Across every major platform you may be using to edit your video you will find one consistent set of tools to work with when color correcting: video scopes. Broadly speaking you’ll have access to Waveform Scopes, The RGB Parade Scope, and the Vectorscope.

Waveform Scopes

There are two broad categories of Waveform Scopes: the standard waveform scope showing you a distribution of dark and light tones in your image and an RGB waveform scope representing overlays of Red, Green, and Blue color distribution of dark and light tones in the image. 

A good place to start to balance the contrast and tone of your image is the standard waveform scope. It’s typically shown as a distribution of fine white dots across a black background forming what appear to be waves on the chart. Left to right on the chart is equal to left to right in the image, up is increased brightness, and down is decreased brightness. The scale is typically represented as both 0% to 100% and 0 to 255 colors. Black is 0 and white is 100/255. So the higher the peak, the brighter that part of the image. The lower the valley, the darker that part of the image.

Assuming your video was shot flat you’ll find that the distribution of your wave is mostly in the center of the chart. It won’t rise up to 100/255 or fall down to 0. You can use the waveform scope as a guide to help you with adjusting your flat footage to have a more natural contrast and tone. This can also help you see if your blacks are too black and hurting detail in the nearby tones or, similarly, if your white are too white. 

The RGB waveform scope is similar to the standard waveform scope but it allows you to see adjustments that are needed per color. So, if the reds are too bright, or the blues too dark, you can track specific adjustments to those tones.

The RGB Parade

The RGB Parade functions very much like the waveform scopes, but rather than being a single scope for the whole of your image it’s three waveform scopes, one for red tones, one for green tones, and one for blue tones. This can be particularly useful for getting a good sense of what color may be dominating a shot and which of these three colors may need to be adjusted.

Vectorscope

The Vectorscope looks very different from the other scopes. This scope is basically a representation of the strength of the colors on color wheel. If you are looking at a flat black image or flat white image the vector scope will only be a dot at the center of the wheel. If the image is red, then that will be a spike in the red section of the color wheel. The bigger the spike the more saturated the color.

The Vectorscope is great for identifying if you have a color cast because the camera wasn’t properly white balanced, or for more advanced users a great way to make sure you’ve got skin tones in the right range.

A Basic Workflow for Balancing Your Footage

Different platforms have somewhat differing controls and options for your color., But you’ll generally always find curves, color wheels, and simple sliders controls for different attributes including overall exposure, highlights control, shadows control, and color saturation control. Learn about the controls for your platform of choice to work through the process that follows.

Crushing It

To get started with balancing your footage: crush it. That is take all the controls and turn everything down until your footage is totally black or close enough to it. You basically want to start at zero and start revealing the light until the image starts to look natural, and the scopes start to look balanced.  

If you have global controls like an overall exposure control, bring this up just below the default setting to get started with properly making the fine adjustments to your exposure.  

Reveal the Light

Then adjust the controls for blacks, shadows, and contrast. Adjust them and watch the bottom of your waveform scope. Move the controls until you bring the bottom of the waveform just up above 0. You’ll notice it was below 0, you can bring the blacks in your image down below 0, which is called “crushing the blacks,” and that will also bring the other dark tones in the image down, often also to black. For now we’re bringing everything up just above being totally black. We’ll be adjusting it more later.

Then you should adjust the controls for whites, highlights, and brightness up until you get the peaks just up to the edge of the 100/255 mark on the chart. This will also bring your shadows and blacks up and your image will likely look too bright. Go back and adjust your blacks, shadows, and/or contrast controls to bring the parts of the image that are supposed to be flat black down closer to zero while keeping the other dark parts of the image from losing detail. 

Balancing the Light and the Dark

Once you work through these first steps go through and make fine adjustments to each setting. What you are generally looking for is adjusting the exposure so that as much as possible you’re retaining details in the highlights that aren’t supposed to be pure white and in the shadows that aren’t supposed to be pure black.

Depending on the ultimate destination of your project you might need to be concerned about keeping your work broadcast safe or legal. If you project is for the web, then you typically don’t have to worry about this. If it’s going out to broadcast, DVD, DCP, or a similar form of distribution this may be a concern. Larry Jordan breaks down what you need to do to keep your image legal in this post.

Working with LUTs

You may also want to try working with LUTs (which stands for look up table). A LUT or 3D LUT is a method using an array of numbers to map one color space–the way a device or program displays color information–to another.

Since we’re working with digital media all of the colors we’re capturing can be represented with numerical values. Those numerical values reproduce the color by being mapped to combinations of red, green, and blue color. A LUT can be used to change the color space captured by your camera to match the color space of another camera, a display, or even approximations of film stock. LUTs can be useful for streamlining the whole correction and grading process, but it’s not a magic wand that will just correct the footage. You’ll still need to make adjustments to get the best final results with your footage. Shutterstock has a useful tutorial on working with LUTs in color grading.

Get Those Natural Colors

Remember, color is the wavelengths of visible light a material reflects as interpreted by the eye. So, the conditions of your shoot always affect your color. You’re likely already familiar with this from white balancing your footage. Even if you white balanced the camera, you may still need to make adjustments in post. 

Many editing platforms include a white balance tool in their color correction tools. Often it will include a sampling eyedropper. Use that to click on any part of the image that should register white and the tool should automatically adjust the color correction to compensate for the lighting conditions. 

If you need to manually adjust this because you don’t have the sampling eyedropper, or you don’t have anything white in the video, then you’ll typically be manipulating two color controls. One will shift the colors between blue and orange to compensate for color temperature. If the image seems a bit blue, add more orange and vice versa. The other control will shift the colors between magenta and green. This is to compensate for fluorescent lights.

Once you are sure you’ve white balanced the image, check your saturation. Saturation is how intense the colors appear. No saturation is a grayscale image. High saturation tends to look very artificial as the colors are more intense than found in nature.

Shooting flat reduces color saturation as well as the contrast. Adjust the saturation back up in post to get more natural colors. You usually don’t need to add much. Only bringing saturation up by 10 or 20 should get you close depending on the footage.

Refining Your Color Correction

After you’ve balanced each clip, it may not quite feel cohesive. Some clips might fit together well. Others may have such a big change in tone that it’s distracting. Now you need to go through and adjust your color correction so that the tone is consistent and flows from one clip to the next.

One thing that’s important about this part of the process is that it’s not about getting the whole video uniform. It’s about getting each clip to fit with the one before and the one after. Sometimes that means brightening a clip a bit that has darker colors, though was already clear when balanced. Sometimes that means darkening a clip that has a light of light colors. Often it’s a little of both. The clips don’t need to match exactly. Just try and make sure the transition isn’t jarring. You may find as you do this that clips from a single source may look slightly different at different parts of the project depending on these adjustments. That’s okay. Remember your audience will be watching this beginning to end and not jumping from one part of the video to another to check to see if those clips match.

Stop and Come Back to it Later

One of the most important things you can do when color correcting your own project is walk away from it for at least a few hours. Go for a walk. Have lunch. Go to the gym. Carve up some squash and sweet potatoes so you can play Toto’s Africa. Just get your eyes away from the color correction for a little while. It’s very easy to get sucked into the details of color correcting your video and think everything looks fine, when in fact everything is a little blue, a little too bright, or a lot magenta. You won’t notice it if you’ve just been staring at it for hours, so you just have to walk away and come back later.

A Quick Color Grade Process

As stated, a color grade is different from color correction. Color correction balances the footage. Color grading adds style and reflects the intended tone of the piece. When doing the color for your own projects, and after you’ve finished color correcting, you may want to try your hand at color grading.

Most editing platforms with color correction tools also have presets for color grading. Sometimes they are separate effects. Sometimes they are presets in the color correction tools. For a quick color grade find one of the presets that works, apply it to all of your clips, and then go through and adjust the intensity of the preset or effect until it looks right for that clip. 

Check out this primer on color grading: 

We won’t go too in depth on color grading here, but if you want to dive deeper into color correction and grading you may want to study up on color theory.

This article was originally written by Sean Mannion, Filmmaker - 4MileCircus

Instagram Stories: When And Why Should You Post Them?

Instagram is one of the most popular social media networks, and this is largely due to its wide range of posting options for users. People who use Instagram feel like they have the freedom to post however they want to, thanks to the options of photo or video posts which remain on your account, sending pictures directly to other users which can either be seen instantly and lost or kept for a certain amount of time or the massively popular ‘stories’ which last for twenty four hours and can be edited extensively to make them look just like a user wants them to, with filters, stickers and links galore. But, if you are trying to make as many relevant people become exposed to your stories as possible, how often should you post?

How Many?

The simplest question is how many stories should you post every day? Ten. Ten is the simple answer to this question, since it is neither too many nor too little stories to post. If a user taps onto your stories and sees that there are so many that the small white markers which appear at the top of the story and indicate how many stories there are within your profile for that day have become pinpricks, they’re going to swipe away or tap through your stories without bothering to check the content. To make sure that you’re not boring your followers, but also giving them enough content at the same time, keep your stories at a consistent ten everyday.

Consistent

Speaking of being consistent, that is a major part of whether your followers will be looking out for your stories or not. If a follower knows that they can see good quality, relevant content everyday from your Instagram account, then they’ll be more likely to search through their stories notifications for your account, and not immediately tap through your story when they’re going through all of their notifications. Developing trust and something of a relationship between you and your followers is vital, and consistency can help this a lot.

Spreading Out

While ten might be the magic number, that doesn’t mean you can just spam your story feed with same-ish posts in an hour and call it a day. This is likely to encourage followers to tap through all your stories, making them pointless and removing any chance of information being communicated through them. If you post at different times throughout the day, then not only will followers see different types of content and pay attention to every single post, but they can also check back at different times throughout the day and relive the day of your account, if you post in a ‘documentary’ style.

Don’t Repeat

“Sure, giving links to your accounts on other social media networks can always work to give your different accounts little boosts, especially if one is noticeably more popular than another, but don’t just get lazy and start re-posting your Snapchat stories on Instagram constantly, for example, or vice versa,” Leslie Conlan, a social media manager at Last Minute Writing and Writinity, says, “since your fans will most probably follow you on many different social media networks - in this day and age, no one just has one social media account - and seeing the same content on many of your stories will just make them bored, and create a lazy feeling and atmosphere around your account. Avoid boring your followers, and create unique content for your Instagram stories!”

Video Or Photo?

Videos grab peoples’ attention. Photos are still, and, generally speaking, don’t grab anyone’s attention in the way that a video can. “Statistics show that Instagram users are less likely to swipe away from videos, and the chance of them exiting the story decreases with every passing frame.” Brandon Gibbs, a brand marketer at DraftBeyond and Research Papers UK, states. “Videos can show users more content in a single post, putting across more information and making both the user’s and your time and effort more worthwhile - and if it’ll keep a viewer’s attention for longer, then why wouldn’t you try video?” In short, videos are Instagram story gold, and they’ll make sure that your stories grab attention, keep it and put across a lot of crucial information to your followers at once.

About the Author

Angela J. Bryant writes and edits successfully at Lucky Assignments as well as Gum Essays, due to an intense passion for literature and written texts which she has harbored since she was young. Specializing in the highly varied topics of everything from social media and business to job seeking, she has been able to help hundreds of people with her articles, and reach an incredibly wide audience with her many intelligent and experienced messages. Quite rightly, her motto is “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”, which are words which she has lived her life by.

New Collage Storytelling Video Story

Content is king, anyone that is looking to compete in the digital marketing sphere needs to take note of this fact. Various brands are trying to get the attention of the millions of people that are clicking away by the seconds. Therefore, you need to bring your "A" game and in this case, it means quality content.

You must create content that has value, and, is relevant. Your media channels can experience amazing boosts as a result of stellar content. Audiences expect you to provide them with a blend of insights and entertainment. This is a great way to build a rapport (and trust) with your audience. When you can understand your target demographic then you will create amazing content that suits their needs. Your content can also help you to build a reputation as one of the thought leaders in your industry.

When used effectively, social media is a great tool for increasing brand awareness. Businesses can raise awareness for products and services and reach out to a wider audience with digital marketing. Customers, on the other hand, have become accustomed to a wide range of options for whatever needs. With the click of a button, you can get a list of 10 businesses that practically offer the same kind of service. This is why brands need to ensure unique means of reaching out to (potential) customers and this can be done by creating an effective brand story.

The Importance of Your Brand’s Story

Storytelling has been a way of grabbing the attention of men since time immemorial. Over the generations, the act of storytelling has been made to serve many purposes of passing across the information. Stories have been used for several benefits including branding and marketing.

When it comes to telling stories effectively, brands need to understand how to effectively combine visual and written content. This is crucial because people are only influenced when they can relate to your brand’s story. This is why you need to effectively tell your brand’s story in a way that properly describes the experience that customers can expect from your brand.

To increase visibility and subsequent brand awareness, brands need to create a unique story. In creating this story, brands need to consider their target audience and subsequently create content that is in line with what customers want to see. This is the best way to improve engagement and subsequently increase the brand’s reach.

Vdeesign’s New Solution: The Collage Storytelling Video Story

Do you need to promote content in a clean, unique and highly compelling manner? If yes, then the new collage storytelling video story is the ultimate tool. This tool has been designed for simple use; all you need to do is to import your photos and videos while simply include text.  Speed is a crucial factor when it comes to the creation of stellar video content and this template provides both speed and ease of use.

This new tool is the preferred option when it comes to the creation of unique designs. With a wide range of clean and sophisticated designs, this tool is a great option for brands across all sectors. Whether your brand is into marketing, e-commerce, sports, retail, or entertainment, the new collage storytelling video story is ideal.

In terms of technical details, collage storytelling video story is put together by expert designers. In terms of performance and optimization, this template is top-notch. It is fully compatible with Adobe's after-effects version CS 5.5 and above and to use it, users do not require any plugins.

With its sheer simplicity, this template is the ultimate tool for effective communication. Content created with this template can be used across various platforms because it uses the simplest (and most sophisticated) design language. Therefore, with this tool, it is easy for your brand to stand and be recognized for the consistent creation of quality content.

Features

1. This Template offers users swift rendering and makes it possible for users to produce quality video content regularly.

2.  Another great feature of this template is the fact that it offers 100% after effects native project.

3. This template is also organized and easy-to-use with a great user interface. It is a great option for brands because it can be used by professionals as well as ‘amateur’ designers.

4. This template is a great option because it also offers portrait and landscape modes. This means that it is also suitable for mobile devices.

5. This tool puts you in the director's seat as it gives you extensive customizing options. Apart from being able to adjust all the slides, users can also fully customize colours, as well as, texts.

6. Users can also use this tool to drag and drop pre-animated placeholders.

7.  In terms of resolution, this template works with 4K, HD, 720p, as well as, HD resolutions.

8. Vdeesign puts customers first and this is evident with the dedicated customer support, step by step video tutorials, as well as, the provision of free regular updates.

Rounding Up…

The Hallmark of branding and marketing is the influence that brands exert of individuals. This is evident when individuals decide to purchase from a particular business instead of purchasing a similar product from a competitor. When customers make decisions on what brands or business to patronize from, it is mostly an emotionally backed decision. Therefore, brands need to understand how to get these emotions out of customers in a bid to create trust between the brand and such customers.

It is also important to create stories with tools that provide fast and easy rendering. The new collage storytelling video story has been specially designed by industry professionals to the best standards. This template provides a professionally created modular structure and detailed video tutorials on how to make the best use of this template. Also, the creators of this template (Vdeesign) are always available to help customers settle any complaints via e-mail.

As I said earlier, the hallmark of marketing and branding is the influence that brands exert. This can be done with the use of the new collage storytelling video. It contains everything that brands need to effectively promote and communicate.

When you think of the magnificent delivery of brand stories, think of the new collage storytelling video story from Vdeesign.

How Much Should Your Budget For Marketing in 2019

You’re looking forward to a successful 2019. The Year of the Pig. You know marketing is a key component to the success of your business, but you’re not sure how much you need to budget for 2019. It’s a conundrum. You don’t want to spend too much time figuring out what other people are doing. Even though we’d love to have a single, simple answer and a one-size-fits-all answer, the reality is that marketing budgets depend upon industry and revenue.

Whether you’re in the B2C or B2B space, you can’t sell your product or service unless people know about you. It’s easy to assume that one piece of marketing content can meet all the needs of every audience. That’s simply not the case. Sure, people may remember the last ad or image that converted them from “Eh, maybe” to “Yes, me!” But most people won’t specifically remember the marketing efforts that brought them from awareness to consideration to purchase. You have to invest in your marketing plan in order to drive results.

Never fear! We’ve dug into the research to give you some of the most reliable industry buzz so you can make a more informed decision in 2019. We’re also going to point out emerging social media platforms, so you can see if marketing on those mediums might work for your company. There is nothing like getting in on the ground floor. Who knows? Maybe you’ll end up establishing yourself as an authority on the next Facebook before Facebook goes the way of Myspace.

Why you need to care about your marketing budget and where to put your money in 2019

We all know that marketing isn’t cheap, especially since our competition is all across the world compared to just 25+ years ago. Because of this huge change in the marketing landscape, understanding how to get the most from your marketing dollars is more important than ever. One of the world’s wealthiest men, Bill Gates, said if he was down to his last dollar, he’d spend it on marketing. Which makes a ton of sense, because your customers can now buy anything from anywhere, at any time. All this does is force you to work harder and longer to get noticed and keep their attention.

Thankfully, there is a path to success even in today’s highly competitive marketing world. The best place to start is your annual marketing budget; here are three of the best ways to approach your marketing budget for 2019: as a percentage of your overall budget, revenue, or average cost per lead.

Making changes to budget based on a percentage of your overall budget

It’s no surprise that as more channels to reach customers open up, there are more places to spend your budget. In fact, most industries expect to increase their marketing budgets in the coming year. Across B2C and B2B, the average marketing budget is 11.1 percent of a firm’s total budget. Now, if you’re looking to expand or grow even more year over year, you’ll probably need to increase that number to meet your new goals. Don’t be shy about your vision for your company. You must be fearless when it comes to making your dreams into a business reality.

However, we must remind you that the 11.1 percent figure is an average of four sectors – B2C product, B2C service, B2B product, and B2B service. We know it’s important to look at individual sectors in order to get the best 360-view of how your business is doing within your space.

• 16.0 percent of the overall budget for B2C product

• 14.9 percent of the overall budget for B2C service

• 9.2 percent of the overall budget for B2B product

• 8.9 percent of the overall budget for B2B service

In part because of how competitive the consumer space can be, we found that most B2C marketing budgets are a larger portion of the overall annual spend for the companies surveyed. Within the B2B space, there are often fewer competitors and more distinction of value propositions, so those B2B companies offering services don’t necessarily need to spend as much of their overall budget on marketing.

Updating marketing budget based on a percentage of total revenue

If looking at your marketing budget as a part of your overall budget doesn’t make your heart flutter, then what you can do is approach your marketing budget as a percentage of revenue. By looking at revenue, you can get your sales and marketing teams on the same page, because the marketing department needs the revenue generated by the sales folks to make their budget happen. Another benefit of using your revenue is that you can adjust up or down, depending upon your employees’ wins.

When looking at the average of B2C product, B2C service, B2B product, and B2B service, marketing spend is 7.9 percent of a company’s revenue. This is down from a high of 11 percent of total revenue from six years ago, but up from 6.9 percent the year prior. We predict marketing spend as a percentage of revenue to increase year over year, especially if the GDP of the US remains high. People like to spend when times are good.

But, once again, the actual percent spent depends on if you’re in the B2B or B2C space. Let’s look at the individual averages for the B2C and B2B spaces regarding marketing spend.

• 9.6 percent of revenue for B2C product

• 11.8 percent of revenue for B2C service

• 6.3 percent of revenue for B2B product

• 6.9 percent of revenue for B2B service

As you can see, B2C companies tend to spend more on marketing than B2B. Of note is that those offering services often spend more than those offering products. Keep that in mind when you’re examining your budget and how to position yourself for success in 2019.

Adapting your budget based on your average cost per lead

Now, if percentages aren’t your thing and you have a strong sales process, then you can look at your marketing budget in 2019 from the perspective of the average cost per lead. Careful, this does require extensive knowledge of your sale cycle from start to finish. By looking at the cost per lead and the percentage of leads that turn into sales, you can reverse engineer how much budget you need to put behind your marketing efforts to generate your ideal 2019 revenue. If you don’t know how you can figure out your cost per lead, then this method isn’t right for you.

Our research has shown that cost per lead can vary wildly by industry. For example, according to Hubspot, some costs per lead can be as low as $11 (media and publishing) to as high as $100 (financial services). Knowing the industry average for your cost per lead can help you determine if your marketing strategy is working or needs revision.

We know it’s not enough to look at the cost per lead within your industry. You also want to make sure the cost per lead is appropriate based on the channel and approach you are using. Here’s how the cost per lead stacks up by channel, according to SurveyAnywhere:

• $14 for SEO and content marketing

• $27 for social media

• $33 for retargeted advertising

• $39 for email marketing

• $43 for social media advertising

• $45 for webinars

• $54 for referrals

• $60 for search engine advertising

• $71 for Google Ads (Display and Search)

As an aside, email is one of the most effective channels, despite its higher price tag for cost per lead when compared to SEO, content marketing and social media. Adding in video (even a link to one) within an email campaign or subject line increases open rates by 19 percent and clickthrough rates 200 to 300 percent. If you haven’t already, you have to start thinking about how to incorporate email in your overall marketing strategy and budget. We think it’s critical to have access to your customers outside of platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Imagine they closed up shop overnight. Would your business survive? How would you find your customers again? Don’t leave email on the backburner in 2019.

Getting the most out of your marketing budget in 2019

Just you knowing what percentage of your budget is going to marketing does not paint the complete picture for your company. Within a 2019 marketing budget, you really must look at the holistic view of where other companies are putting their resources. You don’t want to be outspent by the competition, but you also don’t want to spend way more than you have to. It’s easy to think marketing is all ads, but the real special sauce is in ensuring your team has the resources and knowledge to be successful in the year ahead.

According to a CMO survey, across B2C and B2B, the majority of marketing budgets included the following line items from those surveyed:

• Overhead costs (65.7 percent)

• Marketing research (67.1 percent)

• Marketing analytics (73.4 percent)

• Marketing employees (74.4 percent)

• Social media marketing (82.1 percent)

• Direct expenses of marketing activities (92.3 percent)

Less than half of those same respondents included sales employees (21.7 percent), sales support tools (41.1 percent), marketing training (46.9 percent) and mobile marketing tools (46.9 percent) as part of their overall marketing budget. This means if you include sales employees in your marketing budget and the majority of other firms do not, your marketing budget could look higher than average. It does not necessarily mean you’re spending too much, but rather that you might be putting more resources in the correct place! (Seriously, sales is a part of marketing and vice versa.)

Don’t skimp on investing in knowledge

We found that investing in capability development is a top marketing knowledge priority for businesses going into 2019. The better trained and knowledgeable your team, the more effective your 2019 marketing budget will turn out. In fact, there is an upward trend in investing in training and development, with an average of 4.2 percent of marketing budget going toward that line item.

You have to help your team grow in a professional capacity by helping them keep their skills sharp. You’re in great company – expanding employees’ capabilities is a major priority for most firms. You can’t neglect investing in the most important resource – the people behind the mysterious marketing curtain!

If you don’t invest in their knowledge, then their knowledge will get stale and so will your results.

Don’t be afraid to put more budget toward digital

We know for a fact that traditional media continues to lose share and attention to digital. This means that most marketing budget dollars are shifting toward digital assets. Between smart phones, tablets, laptops and virtual assistants, you’re more wired than ever and so too are your customers. Excuse us while we answer this quick text while checking our email … you get the idea.

We looked at the research and studies and found that the in latest CMO Survey, those who were surveyed planned to allocate 54 percent of their marketing budgets to digital advertising. That’s up a full ten percent from 2018. More than 95 percent of the individuals who answered were at the vice presidential level or higher. These are major players making important, strategic decisions. We know that this means you need to plan on spending a large portion of your budget on digital. Don’t be shy about the multiple opportunities to get your message out in cyberspace. You must incorporate digital into your 2019 marketing budget if you want to remain competitive.

The need for you to push more marketing dollars toward digital makes sense when you realize that about a quarter of US adults say they are almost constantly online. You know you have to go where your audience is at. Newspaper circulation is down because people are content to consume their information via digital feeds. Instead of taking out quarter, half or full-page ads, it’s time to think about page rank and hacking the algorithms that rule our digital lives. We also realize that digital is more than social media. It can include search engine marketing like pay per click (PPC) and landing pages, in addition to Search and Display ads. You have to look at your digital strategy beyond social media.

And it’s important to think about your content and strategy from a mobile perspective, as one in five US adults are smartphone only internet users. Furthermore, even in B2B spaces, people turn to their mobile devices to quickly access information in a convenient way. Think about how often you check in on email with your phone or quickly buy something you thought of off an e-commerce site because you had your phone handy.

Where can you start? If you want to be ready for 2019, look at refreshing your website to be at least mobile ready (even better if you make sure your site is mobile first). You have to think about peppering in embedded videos. We mean, 59 percent of executives would rather watch a video than read a wall of text, when presented the option. But, when you add in video, don’t forget to work with your website developer to ensure that your page’s loading time (and by extension page rank) aren’t negatively impacted. People aren’t going to wait for a page to come up. This isn’t You’ve Got Mail.

We hate it, but social media is pay to play

We found that a full 12 percent of marketing budgets are dedicated to social media, up 243 percent from 2009. Social media is here to stay and you need to be prepared to cough up cash to participate. In part, this is because platforms such as Facebook have made it harder and harder to reach your audience in an organic way. More and more, the algorithm on Facebook won’t show content from brands and companies unless you cough up cash, even in small amounts. Many businesses have spent years (and lots of money) building up their audiences, only to get strong-armed by these platforms with lower reach and less engagement on their organic posts, which in turns forces those businesses to promote or boost their own content to be seen by the audience they built. We’re just as sick of seeing how much more reach our top-performing post could have if we just paid Facebook $20 to do it.

Where should you look to put that 12 percent social media section of your marketing money in 2019? Look into your Google Analytics (if enabled) and see where your social media traffic comes from. Hopefully, you know what your website goals are (number of pages, download of a white paper, etc.) and from there, you can determine which social channels bring in the best quality traffic.

What can you do if you don’t have analytics of where your traffic comes from? You can turn to the social platforms themselves and review an individual post’s performance. Some of the platforms will report how many times the link has been clicked. From there, you can see if one place potentially drives more customers to your landing pages (you do have landing pages set up, don’t you?).

What social channels are most effective?

When it comes to ensuring the money you invest in your business is well spent, you have to know if your marketing efforts are working. Effectiveness is a relative measure. Most folks will remember the very last ad or call to action that tipped the scales and moved them into buying. But they might not attribute the many touch-points that it took to make their final decision. Some social channels are effective because most people are on there day to day. Other social channels are effective because they provide social proof and help build trust within a community (e.g., product reviews). But, for 2019, here are some of the most effective social channels to include in your marketing budget.

• Facebook

• Instagram

• LinkedIn (especially for B2B)

• Messenger Apps

• Google Ads – Search and Display (includes YouTube!)

We’ve scoped out these emerging digital opportunities

Ready to find the next Facebook? Within the digital landscape, there are many emerging opportunities. Here are a few to keep your eyes on in 2019.

• Anchor for podcasts

• Caffeine for live streaming

• TikTok for short mobile videos

• Vero for social media 

One of the more difficult parts of any emerging social media is balancing the desire to get in on the ground floor with the time and energy (and by extension, money) that it takes to truly participate in the community. Being part of a community is more than posting content regularly. It’s about the give and take, ebb and flow that happens on the platform. As it becomes harder and harder to get discovered and found, be prepared to put more marketing dollars behind promotion and brand awareness. 

If anything, looking into emerging platforms may provide some insight into how the major players (and biggest competitors) might react to the threat. In the past year alone, Pinterest has begun to make its feed look more and more like Instagram.

Watching these emerging platforms may give you ideas on how to make your more established platforms shine more. All the best companies do it – take the good ideas and mold them to their audience. Instead of having to react to changes on bigger platforms like the Apple Store, Twitch, Instagram or Facebook, you might be able to be proactive.

Don’t forget traditional media

Yes, many companies are planning on putting more than half their marketing budget toward digital assets. Plans for spending via traditional media are down 1.2 percent from the year prior. But don’t forget about the other 46 percent! (Which isn’t all dedicated to advertising, but still, bear with us.) A solid marketing plan includes using traditional media opportunities to maximize exposure and ROI.

According to the Pew Research Center, 68 percent of US adults use Facebook. With the majority of these folks on social media, it might be tempting to assume a lot of sales are completed online. Not so. In fact, the February 2018 CMO survey found that a mere 12.8 percent of sales (which represents an average of B2B and B2C industries) come from the internet. Now, some industries have much higher percentages, such as education at nearly 33 percent, so make sure to check your own industry’s average.

Stop making your marketing department cry and remember campaigns take time

Every marketer wants you to remember that campaigns take time and testing. Depending on the platform, one ad on one platform may not be enough. Whatever your marketing budget is, remember to add in flexibility to extend or shorten campaigns as needed. If your budget is too rigid, you may not be able to react nimbly enough. While it is important not to spend all your budget in Q1, you also don’t want to get too tight-fisted in Q3 worrying about Q4 budget.

Allowing for flexibility within the marketing budget, especially if there are any plans for growing the business or launching a new product or service, will give your marketing team the best chance at helping reach your 2019 revenue goals. Also, we want to remind you that you won’t necessarily see results the first day an ad campaign runs, so don’t get impatient while your team gathers data to make decisions.

Know thyself and use data to inform marketing decisions

All of our marketing budget recommendations are based on information from other companies. Other companies are not necessarily going to be the right mirror for you to reflect your successes or failures on. We know from years in marketing that it’s important to gather data year over year. What works for one industry might not work for yours. For example, if you track that one social media platform results in more conversions than another, then don’t pour all your money in a different one that doesn’t provide the same results, even if other companies are using it.

Knowing where your wins are coming from is key. Failure to track where leads and conversions come from means wasting precious dollars. By using data and hard facts to inform your strategy, you can better figure out who your audience is and how to best pinpoint where those individuals are located.

We all know that keeping good data and charting progress month over month often provides valuable insights, even if those insights come from dips and ebbs. Whenever possible, try to look at historical data as well. For example, does one month’s dip in performance indicate a downward trend, or is that change in performance typical of that month?

Good data also helps you understand where to plug in those marketing dollars. Sometimes not only do campaigns take time, but closing the sale take time. This is particularly true in the B2B space, where some sales take several years to close due to the length of contracts and decision-making process. For example, if you know that it can take upwards of three years from an initial contact to close, then you want to have that data available so you can better understand your overall pipeline. Better data helps inform better business decisions.

2019 is absolutely the year to add video to your marketing mix

No matter what your marketing budget pie looks like for 2019, make sure you consider where you can add video to your mix. We know for a fact that video helps cut through the marketing clutter. You need to know that year over year between 2016 and 2017, views of branded video content increased 258 percent on Facebook and 99 percent on YouTube. Video is a powerful part of the marketing mix and should be added in where appropriate.

Keep in mind that quality video takes planning and budget. You want to ensure the type of video you choose (animation, testimonial, live) makes sense for what you do and what your audience expects. Looking back at the emerging platforms, three have images and/or video as part of the presentation of information. People are visual creatures. With 73 percent of US adults using YouTube (as compared to 68 percent who use Facebook), it’s clear there is a preference to watch rather than read. People are still watching the equivalent of television, but they are choosing what they watch and when they watch it. So, create good video content and work with your marketing team to get that content in front of the correct audience.

Here’s how much you should budget for marketing in 2019

Here’s what you need to keep in mind after reading this article (or cheating and scrolling down to the bottom and missing out on valuable information!) – Most businesses spend about 11.1 percent of their annual budget on marketing. There is a push to put more dollars into digital, with social media gobbling up 12 percent of the digital marketing budget. But social media isn’t the only place to plug in your funds. Traditional media is still important, particularly because the buying process still takes several touch-points to convert someone (or a business) to a purchase. Keep your marketing budget somewhat flexible to respond to emerging opportunities and remain nimble. Don’t forget that video is a powerful element to cut through the marketing clutter in 2019.

If you’re ready to get your 2019 off to the right start, contact one of our video strategists today!

Should You Hire a Designer To Customize Your Template?

When it comes to running the essential parts of a small business, owners tend to seek to reduce costs. To do this, business owners tend to take up many roles in a bid to save running costs and improve profit. Business owners tend to take up roles such as accounting, social media management, graphics design amongst other things. In this article, we will take an objective look at the question, ‘Should you hire a graphics designer to customize your templates?

The Role Of Graphics In Branding

Whether you are trying to promote your business or simply trying to gain awareness for your brand, graphics design has a big role to play in your business. The modern competitive business environment is one that is saturated with many beautiful brand designs. This way, customers can relate to brands based on these designs.

Also, when it comes to effective communication between individuals and brands, quality designs can make it easy. Here are some other benefits of quality designs for your brand;

1. Sales: With properly designed visual content, businesses can influence the decision of customers. A significant number of consumers attest to the fact that visuals influence their decision to make purposes. Customers are indeed attracted to unique and beautiful designs. With the inclusion of videos on your site and social media platforms, sales can significantly improve.

2. Engagement: This is the most important aspect of digital marketing. With quality visuals, brands can appeal to the emotional part of customers. With properly designed visual content, brands can improve engagement. Quality designs can encourage views, tags, comments, and subsequently help you gain the attention of customers in your industry.

3. Improve brand popularity: Businesses can leverage the amazing potentials of having beautiful designs. A brand can gain wider coverage in its niche market as a result of an attractive logo. Other great ways to improve brand awareness through designs include advertisements, websites, business cards, and so on.   

4. Tell your story: Storytelling is an important aspect of branding. When you utilize the tool properly, you'd find it easy to convey your message to your target customers. With proper visuals, you can effectively convey your brand's message and invoke the right kind of emotion in customers. With the use of specific colours and design components, brands can tell their unique stories effectively.

5. Persuade : Researchers have found that visuals are the most persuasive kind of content. With the creation of quality designs comes the power of persuasion. You can convince customers to think about your business in a certain way with the use of top-notch designs. Humans are more likely to be persuaded when they feel a sense of connection with your designs.   

Are There Worthy Alternatives?

Now to the main point of this article,

Should you hire a graphics designer for your design work? Or Are there worthy alternatives to having a professional graphics designer?

Well, by all means, you can go ahead and hire if you can comfortably afford to. However, there are certain tools with which you can take up your design job (you can begin by assisting your current designer). These kinds of tools provide users with animated templates which can be easily customized.

If you think I am referring to Vdeesign then you are damn right! Vdeesign gives everyone the power to actualize the genius ideas in your mind.

Every human can be creative and Vdeesign brings out that spark of creativity in everyone. With step-by-step tutorials and pre-animated templates that cut across diverse categories, Vdeesign templates can help you begin the process of becoming a professional designer. Using a software like After Effects, users can work with a distinct quality. User support is a pivotal aspect of what Vdeesign delivers and this is where there's the free email support. With this, users can get help on how best to utilize templates. Vdeesign provides all that you need

With all the benefits of quality designed that I have outlined, one can say it without second-guessing that quality designs are crucial. This is why Vdeesign pre-animated templates are preferred by more than 3000 users. Imagine being able to implement your amazing ideas on templates that have been worked on by a collection of artists, animators and designers. Vdeesign puts the power in your hands to effectively share your ideas through proper visuals.

The goal of the Vdeesign team is to ensure that you get the best templates for all your branding and marketing efforts. The designers and animators at Vdeesign have worked on magnificent designs for customers. With this, you do not need to have any graphic design skills in order to use it. All you need to do is to customize text, color, skin, and other components of the design.

Graphics design is an expression of abstract ideas through visually appealing elements. These elements have been properly animated with extensive customization options for users to pick from. No one is born to be a graphics designer, with the right tools, anyone can take significant steps in mastering the process of creating amazing visual content.

Conclusion

To effectively deal with competition in the world of business, you need to be able to grab the attention of customers. With quality designs, you can ensure this and attract potential customers to your business. There is an increasing need for business owners to understand how to design components work. This is helpful because it helps you to personally communicate what your brand is about. 

The importance of graphic design cannot be overstated in business and other aspects of life. This is why you need to ensure that it is done properly. Whether you choose to outsource the job to a professional or you decide to work with tools that are put together by professionals, you need to ensure that your designs are professional.

Another advantage that comes with the use of pre-animated templates is the fact that it offers easy rendering. This means that users can get top quality video content out in real-time. This is important because brands require visuals regularly to consistently grab the attention of audiences.

There are a number of advantages that users can get from using pre-animated templates. However, the most important advantage is the price; professional designers charge hundreds of dollars or higher. On the other hand, the Vdeesign template (with all the necessary design components) can be gotten for as little as $25.

Drive Traffic To Your Product Or Service Pages With How-To Videos

Consumers are bombarded with content every day. Video marketing allows brands to stand out in a crowded marketplace and make human connection with their audience while building trust. Increasingly, brands are incorporating video in their marketing strategies to build brand awareness and grow their customer base. Video also helps with SEO rankings as videos now appear in 70% of the top 100 search result listings.

How-to videos are particularly successful in driving traffic and converting visitors to customers. How-to videos teach something new or build foundational knowledge needed to understand your products. Google reports how-to videos earn the most attention of any content category on YouTube–7 in 10 YouTube users search the platform for help with a problem in their work, studies or hobbies.

If you’re ready to drive more traffic and convert more customers, here are the steps to creating entertaining and engaging how-to videos.

1. Choose the best how-to video to utilize for your product or service.

• Explainer videos help your audience better understand why they need your product or service. Many explainer videos use a sample customer scenario to demonstrate what potential customers can expect if they purchase the product or service.
  Length: 2 – 10 minutes
  

• Demo videos demonstrate how customers can accomplish something with your product or service. You can take viewers on a virtual tour of your software product or show an unboxing and testing of the physical product.
  Length: 30 seconds – 1 minute

Guava Family is a great example of a brand that incorporates both strategies into their video content driving visitors to their product pages.

2. Create compelling content

To attract viewers, video content needs to be creative, concise and high quality. Ensure your content addresses consumers’ needs by asking yourself: 

• What are the key features of your product and what problems do they solve?
  Think about how your product makes customers’ lives better and present it in a way that will help them understand not only what your product is, but why they should buy it.

• What questions do customers frequently ask about your product?
  Use Google Trends and Google Consumer Surveys to help.

• Remember to keep your videos short and to the point.
  Consumers prefer videos under 60 seconds.

The Arena Gym  provides enriching content to potential consumers with instructional videos to help with athletic technique, enticing consumers to train at their gym.  

3. Optimize the video’s headline and title tags

Make your videos easy to find by adding descriptive titles, details, and relevant tags to each. Use buyer personas and Google Trends to identify the keywords most likely to help customers find your video through search engines.

• Optimized title
  The headline or title should only be a few words and include the main keywords you want to rank in search engines.
  

• Appropriate title tags
  Use plenty of relevant keywords while ensuring the title tags fit your brand and will attract your intended audience.

• Full description
  Describe your video in several hundred words, articulating your key points and include relevant keywords, especially those with high video ranking on search engines.

Petcube utilizes this strategy in their how-to videos making it easier for pet owners and consumers to find the video online.

4. Upload and promote the video

Once you have your optimized video, ensure your target audience sees it. In addition to uploading to YouTube, you can promote your video through:

• email marketing
  Using the word “video” in an email subject line can boost open rates. Add a video thumbnail in your emails including email newsletters.
  

• share on social media
  Share your video on social media platforms that make the most sense for the audience you’re trying to reach.

• YouTube channel
  Create a YouTube channel for your company/brand even if you only have one video. YouTube is the second most-searched site and your channel will get a lot of exposure.

• incorporate paid advertising
  Facebook Ads allow businesses to target the right audience for videos by location, relevancy and demographics.

Summary

How-to videos are a great way to drive more website traffic and to acquire more customers. Your target audience will not only receive helpful information, they’ll become acquainted with your brand, build awareness, increase sales and bolster your brand’s reputation.

The Dos And Don’ts To A Successful Video Marketing Campaign

If we combine written content and images, what do you think the chances of it being shared online over video are? Zero. That’s right, not only is video more likely to be shared over text and images, the chances of it happening are 1200%. We’re going to take you through what to do if you want a successful video marketing campaign, and what not to do.

DO: Engage and Entertain

The average human processes visuals 60,000 times faster than text, so why not engage your audience with video? There are a few ways to do this, but storytelling is high on the list. We’re hardwired to engage in storytelling. Delivering a story that reflects your brand rather than selling your product encourages your audience to relate to you. Allow viewers to get smitten with your strong narrative. Be authentic and transparent in your message. That way, your audience will learn from you and trust you. ‘How to’ videos are king–back in 2015 ‘how to’ searches had grown by 70 percent on YouTube.

DO: Offer Subtitles

Text and video make an incredible team. Viewers have acclimatized to reading text with video and written content in the form of captions serves a crucial purpose: accessibility. Think about the last time you were bored to tears in that meeting or nodding off during a teleconference. The one thing that can keep you awake is a video, but it’s better to watch on silent. This is where captions are invaluable.

DO: Review Video Analytics Data

Above anything else, you need to be able to measure your video’s performance. You can’t improve something you can’t analyze. Reviewing data (for views, completion rates, shares, embeds, and influence on profits) allows you to fine-tune your strategy, adjust your campaign and create more opportunities to move viewers through your conversion process.

DO: Have a Call to Action

A common mistake people make when creating video is forgetting to include a call to action. Make sure your call to action is clear and include your contact information or website. Prompt viewers to do something with a metaphoric handshake at the end of the video.

DO Share Your Video

It isn’t good enough just to produce the video. You need to distribute it through social media. Views of branded video content on have increased by 99 percent on YouTube and on Facebook by 258 percent.

With Facebook monopolizing the largest audience of any social network with more than 2.07 billion monthly users, and YouTube still the world’s second largest search engine, you would have to be living under a rock not to realize video on social media is growing at an explosive rate.

Now for what NOT to do…

DON’T: Forget to Think about Video Length

Length is an important factor in engaging your audience. According to Wistia, videos that are two minutes or less are more engaging. Of course, it also depends on the platform. A two-minute video on Facebook or YouTube has the capacity to capture a large audience, but you would need to shorten it for Instagram or Twitter. Just be sure to capture your audience’s attention immediately.

DON’T: Be a Salesperson

Be sure to steer clear of the sales pitch. Your goal is to establish trust and you can’t if you’re prattling about the latest promotion. Once you’ve gained like-ability and built your reputation, go for the sale, but make it subtle. You don’t want to be that pushy salesperson who just won’t quit.

DON’T: Use Poor Quality Videos

It’s important to pay close attention to having a good quality video because it reflects your brand and image. While you don’t need to spend a fortune, look for someone with the skills and knowledge to shoot professional footage for a visually entertaining and engaging video. Poor quality videos are likely to get overlooked or turn viewers off before they even reach the five-second mark.

Wrap-Up

Now that you have the scoop on what to do and what not to do, there’s nothing to stop you positioning your strategy on better footing to achieve success. You won’t regret it.

12 Instagram Video Ideas for SMBs to Increase Sales

Today, Instagram is the fastest growing social network with the largest volume of total user engagement, so it’s no wonder that it has become the most popular platform for business promotion.

Since the network rolls out more and more business-specific features, even small companies can build a successful social media marketing strategy to get value from Instagram.

But with over 25 million businesses on Instagram, it can be a tough task for small businesses to cut through the noise and reach their target audiences on the platform. And it can be even tougher to start selling on the platform unless you have an established following. Thus, small businesses should know how to create content that resonates with your audience, draws attention, and engages.

The solution? Instagram video marketing!

Why? Instagram has become a perfect place for sharing video content, thanks to in-feed videos, Instagram Stories, Instagram Live, and IGTV. Moreover, Instagrammers crave video content.

Let’s the numbers speak for themselves:

• 80% of customers believe that demonstration videos help to make purchase decisions

• Time spent watching video on Instagram has increased by 80%

• Video posts get a 38% higher overall engagement rate than image posts

What is more, 87% of businesses use video as a marketing tool. And if you’re just starting out on the platform, don’t miss out sales potential and learn more about Instagram video marketing that helps to build brand awareness, improve brand reputation, and increase e-commerce sales.

Instagram Video Ideas for SMBs:

1. New Product Announcement

It’s in human’s nature to be curious about new things. When it comes to promoting your business, the situation is the same – your followers are interested in new product announcement, so using video to promote your launch is a great way to grab their attention and interest them in your company.

2. Product Launch

If you launch new products, you’re growing your business, and that’s great. However, this means nothing until you have loyal customers who want to give these products a try. And the best way to spread the word about your new product is to create a short video that hints at what customers can get with it.

3. Unboxing Videos

Although customers rely on brand videos when making purchase decisions, people want to know what they really are. Thus, customers seek out genuine reviews, and the unboxing phenomenon is getting more and more popular among online shoppers. For marketers, it’s a great opportunity to get exposure and promote a business on Instagram.

The main idea is to find an influencer who can review your product and share the unboxing experience. If you don’t have a budget to work with popular bloggers, you can still find Instagram influencers who match your needs and wants. For example, you can work with micro-influencers who don’t charge much for their service yet they have loyal and engaged followings.

4. Product Reviews

When buying products, customers want to get solutions that can solve their problem: Consumers are interested in the benefits your product has. And it’s no wonder that most customers want to find product reviews before making the purchase decisions.

Luckily, video marketing helps to create engaging content that answers customers’ question to your advantage. Once you make an explainer video, you can tell your potential customers about your product, and therefore convince them to give it a try.

5. How-to Video Tutorials

No matter what your product is, there are still customers who want to understand how to use it. Instructional videos are gaining in popularity, so brands produce how-to tutorials that educate their followers. Moreover, sharing these videos is a creative way to tell potential customers more about your product without keeping a focus on it.

6. Q&A Sessions

When starting out, people know nothing about your company and products. Thus, they have many questions before realizing that your brand can meet their needs. Organizing question-and-answer sessions is a great way to let followers understand more about your company, and therefore encourage potential customers to make the purchase decision. Whether you use social listening tools or ask your followers to put questions directly, it’s important to get ready for Q&A sessions to provide answers to frequently asked questions.

7. Expert Roundups

Here comes the ugly truth: When it comes to shopping, people often choose reputable brands over little-known options. For small businesses, this means that they need to gain customer trust first, and being an expert in the niche is a great way to start it out.

With the help of video content, you can organize expert roundups to show your knowledge in the niche. Moreover, using IGTV for business is a smart choice if you plan to upload long-form videos (up to one hour), featuring experts who share their thoughts on niche trends.

8. Lifestyle Videos

People buy not your products, but the lifestyle you sell. Thus, many customers want to see your products in action before adding them to shopping carts.

Once you start promoting a certain attitude and style, you attract your target audience who wants to get this lifestyle. Moreover, people want to understand what they can get with your product, so lifestyle videos get higher engagement.

9. User-Generated Content

In the era of sponsored posts and ads, customers crave authenticity, so it’s no wonder that 83% of people seek out peer recommendations before making the purchase decisions. It also proves the popularity of user-generated content.

After all, people want to see what other customers choose, so this content gives companies an opportunity to build brand trust and loyalty and spark interest in the products. Moreover, when a customer creates a video for the brand, this means it’s worth giving a try, right?

10. Week’s Top Picks

Wouldn’t it be great if you could feature the most popular products in a single post? Creating a video with week’s top picks is a great way to promote many products within a short video.

As a marketer, you must know that small businesses can use content marketing to their advantage, so collecting the best products helps to interest more customers who have different needs and wants. What is more, you can make it easier for followers to discover featured items.

11. Branded Giveaways

No matter what your business niche is, it’s more likely that your potential customers love free stuff. It’s just in our nature to hunt for best deals and offers, and most people want to get something for free.

When you organize a branded giveaway, you attract the right audience and provide your followers with an opportunity to try your product out without buying it. Thus, branded giveaways get engagement, and when you create an animated video, it’s even better.

12. Time-Limited Offers and Discounts

Want to boost engagement and sales? Share time-limited offers with your following. It’s proven that discounts and offers help to increase sales: 76% of young shoppers claim that promos influence their purchase decisions.

Moreover, sharing exclusive offers and discounts with your loyal followers is just another reason for Instagrammers to follow your brand on the platform and spread the word about your business.

How to Create Instagram Videos that Engage – Bonus Tips

Posting Instagram videos isn’t enough to boost e-commerce sales. Your video content should grab the audience’s attention and spark interest, so it’s important to create videos that engage, and here’s how to do it:

• Analyze video performance: If you want to sell more with your Instagram video content, it’s important to ensure that you’re posting the right posts that hook your audience and keep people interested. Thus, you need to use social media analytics to understand what video ideas work well for your following.

• Listen to your followers: Who else wants to turn Instagram followers into customers? To sell on Instagram with video content, you need to know your audience’s pain points, needs, and wants. And there’s no better way to understand them more than listening to them: read their comments, encourage them to start a conversation with your brand, and collect their feedback.

• Rely on professionals: Creating eye-grabbing videos requires much knowledge, time, and effort. Unless you have a budget to hire in-house video creation staff, create compelling Instagram videos.

• Make the most out of Instagram features: Instagram users can share up to 10 pictures and videos in a single post, so it’s a great way to upload a video tutorial or product review to your main feed without clogging it up.

• Run Instagram video ads: Today, Instagrammers follow many accounts on the platform, so it’s more likely your video can get buried in the newsfeed. Thus, you need to make sure people see it online, and paid advertising is a great way to reach your target audience and interest them in your product.

In a Word

Video content marketing is taking the world by storm, and small businesses should make the most out of this trend to get better business results. Using Instagram for business promotion, there are many ways to use Instagram videos to increase sales.

This article was originally published by Hugh Beaulac

Freelance SMM manager and content strategist at MC2 With over 6 years of digital marketing experience, Hugh has a passion for blogging and Instagram marketing. He runs MC2 blog and helps SMBs grow their businesses on social media. As a guest author, he has also been featured on top-notch websites like Semrush, SmartInsights, CrazyEgg, Wordstream, etc

How To Diversify Income For Your Business

Diversification is one concept that is useful in all areas of life. It is one concept that has helped the greatest individuals, as well as brands in a bid to improve and grow. Also, diversification is important because it is never advisable to put all your eggs in one basket.

What is Income Diversification

Income diversification is important for businesses of all sizes. When you diversify your income, you reduce the risk of getting caught in a fix if one means of income slows down.

Income diversification is the process of creating several sources of income from your business. It refers to opening up a business to multiple streams of income. It is never a good business strategy to put all your eggs in one basket.

Why is Income Diversification Important?

As a business owner, you cannot afford to be complacent when you have revenue rolling in. You need to ensure that you never get tired of taking on fresh responsibilities as a business owner. This will help you provide values in more ways than one. However, to avoid making the same mistake that other businesses make, you need to ensure that you do it rightly.

Doing it rightly in this case simply means that you have to do it with a concrete plan in mind. This plan will help you successfully run all your streams of income and to make the best out of them. Success with income diversification will leave you with several backup options for steady revenue. Also, you need to diversify income if you want to protect the future of your business and secure your financial future, as well as, those of your family members.

It is easy for one source of income to drain your energy and distract you from potential growth. It happens in many cases where businesses require more dedication from business owners (as well as employees). No matter how amazing the deal or the customer may be, having customers on a single stream of income is never enough guarantees. By taking new opportunities, you will effectively leverage your current resources for greater returns in other aspects of your business.

Importance Of Preparation

Depending on the extent to which you decide to diversify, you can either tap into new and exciting markets or simply satisfy the needs of your existing customer base. A little preparation can go a long way in helping you to start correctly with income diversification.

Although diversification provides business owners with a lot of opportunities, it could also fail if isn't done properly. This is why you need to ensure that you prepare adequately to limit (beat) the risks of failure.

Diversification is not something that a business decision that can be made under pressure. You need to ensure proper consideration.

Top Ways To Diversify Your Business

1. Leveraging the internet

With the digitalization of things, you need to take advantage of the opportunities that the internet provides for income generation. The world has never been more connected than it is with the use of data generated. Brands can get crucial information about performance as well as open up new streams of income with the internet.

Another great way to use the benefits of the internet for your business is by creating a content website or blog. With the use of quality imagery, brands can engage people from all over the world. There are several ways to make money on the internet, examples include; Affiliate income and revenue from Ads. Social media is another way to represent your brand online and effectively reach out to potential clients.

Lastly, to leverage the benefits of the internet, you need to ensure that you put in consistent effort. It is not a day's affair, you need to put in several hours of effort (or pay someone to).

2. Focus on sales

No matter what level your business is on, you need to ensure that you never lose sight of sales. The biggest businesses in the world understand this fact and this is why they always push for sales. No matter how well things may be going for your business, you need to ensure that you focus on capturing leads and subsequent conversions (sales). By constantly focusing on improving sales, you are getting the best out of that means of income. By consistently chasing and capturing leads, you can earn the trust of customers and improve that stream of income.

3. Create passive income

This is a great way to diversify and it is common with authors. With passive means of income, you can create valuable products that will continue to be relevant through time. When you create a passive stream of income then you can focus on building other aspects of your business. Passive income streams provide you with money on an ongoing basis.

4. Add product to current service/ service to current product

If you already own a service that has customers then you can diversify by including products with that service. For example, Vdeesign is a group of creative minds that work together to give the best designs in terms of products. The team has been able turn the service of designing into profitable products.

Conversely, you can add a service to your existing product. A great way to do this is by becoming a consultant and by training (aspiring) professionals. This way, you can leverage the trust that people have in your existing products. For this to work, you need to pick a field where you are an expert.

Rounding Up…

Diversification is a great thing, especially when you open your business up to opportunities for passive income. This way, you can generate income for daily expenses (both personally and for the business). One common factor with all these streams is the need to ensure that sales come in whether you are selling products or services.

Partnerships and investments are also great ways to diversify your income. You can make great amounts of money by making the perfect investment. Also, for partnerships to work out well, you need to ensure that you have an end goal.

Making Social Media Work

When done right, social media is a great way for small businesses to grow. It can cause your sales to skyrocket and increase your business’ income. Social media is so efficient that some businesses are built solely on social media. As long as you understand the rules of social media then you will get the immense benefits that follow. On the flip side, social media may harm a brand if it is used wrongly. Remember it is about projecting the image of your brand to other people.

In this article, we will take a look at the best way to make social media work for your brand. We will look at some practical tips that have helped marketing professionals over the years.

Starting Out

Just as it is in the game of basketball, the fundamentals are always very important. When you are starting out your social media campaign, you will need to recognize your audience. Social media is a diverse space and you need to understand how to reach your target audience. The main goal of your social media campaign is to reach out and interact with (prospective) customers.

The nature of your business is crucial in determining what social media platforms that you should focus on. This is the first step in ensuring that you find success with your social media campaign. For example, if you are a retailer that sells visually appealing goods, then Instagram is a great place for you. However, this does not mean that you have to restrict yourself to a single platform. You simply need to understand your audience and subsequently focus your efforts on the most relevant platforms.

Have a Goal

In order to have an overall direction for your social marketing efforts, you have to work with a goal in mind. As soon as you are clear on your target audience, it is important to have a goal for your social media marketing. As a matter of fact, you need to have general goals and specific goal. Your general goals are the goals that you have generally for your social media marketing while specific goals are for specific social media platforms. For example, your general goal may be to improve sales and brand awareness while your specific goal may be to attain a certain level of impressions on Instagram.

Both general and specific goals can help you understand how to go about your social media campaign. Results are crucial when it comes to social media marketing. It is easy to get distracted by the number of followers or likes that your posts are having. However, when you have a bigger goal then you will focus on the big picture.

Social media marketing has to be strategic and well-planned in order to see real results.

The Importance Of Authenticity

Branding is the purposeful and intentional representation of a brand. Social media is a pivotal tool that can be used to effectively represent your business and what it stands for. This is why the number one rule when it comes to social media marketing is authenticity. Every brand has unique stories and experiences to share with their target audiences. Originality is crucial because it is what appeals to your audiences.

One common mistake that people make when it comes to social media marketing is that they try to be perfect. Perfection is always a myth, so it’s safe to not bother seeking to be perfect. Instead, you need to be trustworthy and the best way to build trust is by being authentic.

Engagement Is Crucial Too

Social media is a great way to build relationships and add value to audiences. If you are posting messages and you are not getting any feedback on your social media channels then you should know that there is a problem. Many people create quality content and push it through their social media pages without engaging.

In social media, the goal is not just to engage, but to engage consistently. You can set the agenda rightly by building meaningful relationships with your audience. By joining the conversation creatively, you can get valuable engagement that will further improve your marketing efforts.

You need to ensure that you talk to your audience because proper interaction is the hallmark of social media marketing. When you make it a habit to talk to your audiences, then it makes it easy for them to subsequently talk about your company. This is a great thing for your company because you can generate conversations and attention around such instances. Everyone loves it when they get direct responses from businesses and with social media, you can address the needs and concerns of your (prospective) customers.

Engagement is not restricted to those moments when customers praise your product/service. You also need to ensure engagement when customers complain about a product or service. This goes a long way in showing your brand is human and more importantly, it shows that your brand is willing to take responsibility.

Be Active

Although this seems like an obvious piece of advice, however, there are brands that still miss this. It is not enough to be active in the first few months of your social media campaign and subsequently take time off. Social media moves at the speed of light and with regular activity, it is easy to be forgotten if you are inactive. You need to ensure that you post consistently and improve the reach of your business.

Your social media is a great way to show the "human side" of your brand. This way, people can relate to the brand and trust the brand. When you actively get involved with your customers via your social media channel, then you can create a strong emotional bond with them. With this kind of bond, your social media audiences will look forward to interactions with your brand. This is one of the best ways to create a powerful base of brand loyalists.

If you cannot connect to your audiences on a personal level then it is less likely that they connect with your brand. This is why you need to ensure that you take out time to listen, engage and properly respond to their concerns.

Summing It Up…

It is easy for marketers to get excited at the prospects that social media marketing offers. However, it takes planning and consistency in order to reap the immense benefits that social media offers. In order to get the best from social media, you need to ensure that you understand what works on various social media platforms. The best way to make social media work for your brand is by ensuring that you use the perfect proportion of visuals and written content.

On a final note, success in social marketing may take time. However, the results are amazing.

The best Adobe deals in 2019: How to get a Creative Cloud discount

Get the very best Adobe CC deals, Photoshop deals and more.

Excellent Adobe deals might be few and far between – but they do happen, proving the company is occasionally prepared to offer a decent discount. And when it does, you'll find it here. We're keeping a close eye on Adobe's prices, and updating this page with all the best Adobe deals as soon as they go live.

Whether you’re a student or professional looking for an Adobe Creative Cloud deal – and whether you’re a graphic designer, web designer, artist, photographer, motion designer, video editor or interested in other creative fields – we've got you covered.

The best Adobe deals right now:

40% off Adobe CC All Apps (Annual plan): £30.34/€35.69 pm
If you live in Spain, France, UK, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands or  Sweden, you're in luck. Adobe has launched a new deal, which shaves 40% off the price of an annual subscription to Creative Cloud, taking the cost down to just £30.34/€35.69 per month! DEAL ENDS: 4 August 2019
VIEW DEAL

Adobe Creative Cloud student and teacher All Apps
US: $19.99 per month | UK:  £16.24 per month
Save over 60% - If you're a student or a teacher, you can save over 60% on Adobe’s most popular annual plan, CC All Apps. That gives you access to the entire collection of 20+ creative desktop and mobile apps (including Photoshop CC, Illustrator CC and Adobe XD CC) plus 100GB of cloud storage, Adobe Portfolio, Adobe Fonts, Adobe Spark and more. Save over 60% on Adobe CC All Apps if you're a student or teacher.
VIEW DEAL

Adobe Stock: Get 10 free Adobe Stock images
US: Free 30-day trial | UK: Free 30-day trial
You can try Adobe Stock for free with a 30-day trial. Sign up for one year of Adobe Stock ($29.99/month) and you’ll get one month – or 10 images – free. You can cancel with no strings attached at any point within the first month.

Adobe deals: what we saw on Amazon Prime Day 2018

So what sort of discounts did we see from Adobe around Amazon Prime Day, Black Friday and Cyber Monday last year? Well, traditionally the company hasn’t got too involved in these major shopping events. Between 2014 and 2017, Adobe slashed the price of Adobe CC by 20% – and while that certainly isn't bad, it's an Adobe deal we see cropping up now and again throughout the year, so it's also nothing special.

In 2018, however, Adobe went big, with a number of excellent Creative Cloud discounts across its portfolio of tools. Here are the best offers we saw:

Adobe Creative Cloud All Apps: Save up to 39% now
Save 39% - Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Brazil and Japan
Save 25% - The Americas and Asia-Pacific region
Adobe slashed the cost of its All Apps annual plan of creative desktop and mobile apps – including Illustrator CC, Photoshop CC, Adobe XD CC and more – in this huge Black Friday and Cyber Monday  Creative Cloud discount.  

Adobe Creative Cloud Photography Plan (1TB): save 25%
Eligible countries: Worldwide (excluding Europe, the Middle East and Africa) - 14.99/month (was $19.99/month)
Adobe slashed the price of its pro package of photo-editing applications by a quarter for Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2018. You could get Photoshop, Lightroom CC, Lightroom Classic CC, Adobe Spark and 1TB of Cloud photo storage for a massive 25% less than usual.   

Adobe Creative Cloud Photography Plan (20GB): save 20%
Eligible countries: Europe, the Middle East and Africa – $15.99/£8.32 per month (was $19.99/month)
Based in Europe, the Middle East or Africa? Then you could save 20% on Adobe's 20GB CC Photography Plan. You got Photoshop, Lightroom CC, Lightroom Classic CC, Adobe Spark and 20GB of Cloud photo storage for just $15.99/£8.32 per month with this non-ended Black Friday and Cyber Monday Adobe deal. 

One great Adobe deal that occasionally surfaces on around these times is a huge 40% discount on Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements. In fact we recently saw this very deal for those living in Europe, Asia and the Middle East recently, so we're hopefully that will resurface and include the rest of the world too. We can hope, right? If not, last year we saw a number of retailers (including Amazon, B&H, Best Buy and Staples) selling the stripped back photo-editing software for just $60 – anything is better than nothing, right? 

How to get the best Adobe deals

The easy way? Stick with us. We’ll continue to post the best Adobe deals here, before anyone else. So bookmark this page – and make sure you check back regularly. 

And alternatively, you can keep an eye on the Adobe website… 

More of today's best Adobe Creative Cloud deals

Our price tracking software is always searching for the best Adobe deals. Scroll down to see the lowest Adobe Creative Cloud prices possible, right now... 

5 Tips For App Store App Preview Videos

Looking for help to produce an App Preview video? As you know, App Preview videos allow you to showcase the characteristics and functionality of your newly developed iOS app in a brief video users can watch when they access the App Store. App Preview videos are usually between 15 and 30 seconds in length, so it’s important to make the most of your time to try and show what makes your app so unique. To avoid leaving stuff out, at Placeit marketing tools we’ve come up with a short list of suggestions to help you with your App Preview. 

Here are 5 tips to help you create an outstanding, attention-grabbing App Preview video for your potential consumers: 

1.  Keep it simple

It’s very important for your app preview to describe your app’s functions while trying to convince users to download it. Remember that transmitting a clear, smooth message is always better than having complicated, extravagant graphics and effects.

2. Speak only if necessary

When creating App Preview videos it’s better to sometimes let apps speak for themselves. It’s important to know when to or when not to speak, but if you do are thinking of speaking make sure it’s 100% necessary.  You need to have in mind that App Previews are the same everywhere, so language may be an obstacle when it comes to having someone speak on your video.

It’s extremely important to hire someone to do the voiceover if you decide to speak on your App Preview video, but don’t have the best voice. Remember that App Preview videos allow you to showcase how your app looks and functions on screen without needing to talk.

3. Remember App Previews are for everyone 

When producing an App preview video you need to be conscious they are meant for all audiences, so your video needs to be suitable for all ages. Videos must not contain violence, sexual themes, profanity and objectionable content.

4. Script it

It’s necessary to have a storyboard and outline every relevant aspect of what will be displayed on you App Preview video in order to not leave anything relevant out. Don’t forget your 15-30 seconds time-lapse.

5. Remain within the app

Don’t film people interacting with the devices, it’s important to only focus the attention on what’s being displayed on the screen.

When producing an App Preview video it’s important to have in mind the following:

– App Previews are not enough to advertise your app.

– App Previews are iOS exclusive, but your app might not be.

– App Previews are device specific.

There you go, you are now ready to promote your app like the pros with professional videos and mockups! You can also use pre-animated video templates like this to help you start publishing your own App Preview videos.