Proliferation

Feb 06
0

Simple Do-it-yourself SEO Tips

By | digital marketing, marketing, SEO, Utah | No Comments

SEO is the framework of any successful brand and without it you might find yourself struggling to reach the results you’re aiming for. While it may sound complicated, there are some simple SEO tricks you can utilize that do not require extensive knowledge on SEO practices. While it is recommended you reach out to SEO companies to help your brand make its mark in your specific industry, we also understand that sometimes that’s not always an option right away, especially if you’re just starting to figure out your business.

Even if marketing companies are out of the question for the time being, you shouldn’t neglect basic SEO practices. Here are some of the simplest SEO practices you can do yourself while preparing to request the services of professional SEO companies.

Research Effective Keywords for Brand

Keywords are the center point of any piece of SEO content, but it’s not enough to just throw in random keywords that sound as if they’ll fit your piece. To make sure your content ranks well on search engines, you have to research keywords and see which ones are ranking and being searched for the most. If you’re on a budget, you can use the Google Keyword Planner to come up with a list of keywords that you can use within your content to improve your SEO.

Practice Basic On-page Optimization

Optimizing the pages on your website can help your company rank even higher on search engines if done properly. As search engines continue to make improvements, they’re getting better at narrowing down what a page is about by searching for specific keywords. Some simple things you can do to optimize your pages are to:

Use Meta Descriptions: these are a form of tag that help bring in visitors form a search page. The potential visitor will see a link to your site, followed by a description that is usually under 160 words that contains a few keywords.

Use the H1 Tag: this can also be referred to as the heading of a page. This header should appeal to the page’s visitor and describe the page as accurately and interestingly as possible.

Create Alt Tags: these tags appear when you hover your mouse over an image. It’s best to make sure these tags are used as keywords to help your SEO ranking even further.

Create Quality Content

Once you’ve done adequate research on your keywords, you should begin creating quality content in the form of blogs, videos, infographics and social posts. When it comes to content, stick to subjects that may be interesting to your target audience and make sure that you use the highest-ranking keywords within your pieces to draw in visitors and create strong backlinks. SEO companies are usually comprised of different teams in charge of the various types of content, but if your team is limited, you can focus on writing blogs about subjects your company understands.

SEO doesn’t have to be complicated to begin with, but once your business starts growing, you’ll want to reach out to SEO companies for your SEO needs. If you’re ready to take the next step into the world of SEO, contact us here at Fusion 360 Agency. SEO is our specialty, and you won’t find a better marketing agency than us.

Feb 05
0

Different Video Ads for Different Platforms

By | digital marketing, SEO, Utah, video production | No Comments

Video advertisements are always with new and entertaining ways to represent their brand, and as a result, we get some of some of the most powerful and appealing ads of the time. Even though the purpose of these ads are to promote s specific cause, brand or product, there are many that still are captivating even if you are not a target for the ad.

Watching these ads, you might also notice that depending on the platform, they may also be structured differently. This is because different platforms call for different ad styles, and it’s important for marketing companies to understand this so that they don’t create something that won’t perform on certain platforms. Here are the different types of video ads and what platforms they work on.

Out-stream Video Ads

We’ll begin by talking about out-steam video ads. These types of ads are generally used as stand-alone content, meaning that they can go out without being accompanied by any other sort of content. One of the biggest benefits of out-stream ads is the ability expand your company’s reach and build significant brand awareness. You’ll find that out-stream videos will drive online purchases and target key consumers as well. You’ll most likely find out-stream ads on TV, on companies’ personal webpages, or on different social media platforms (i.e. YouTube, Instagram and Twitter).

In-stream Video Ads

In-stream video ads are the most commonly seen advertisements today. These ads are described as linear because they run in line sequentially with content or material you are searching for. Marketing companies will usually divide these ads into pre-roll, mid-roll and post-roll videos that play at the beginning, middle or end of a video you are trying to watch online. You’ll find these ads on video sharing platforms such as YouTube, and streaming platforms like Hulu and HBO ⎯ here are some explanations on these video ads:

Pre-roll ads are ran before a video starts. This can be beneficial to the marketing company because the ad is the first thing that the viewer will see: Although they can be skipped, if marketing companies craft an engaging ad from the beginning, you’ll likely reel in some potential consumers.

Mid-roll ads are played while the video is being viewed. These ads will most likely play in the middle of a video, and although they may be intrusive, it is unlikely that a viewer will click away due to the fact that they may want to finish their video.

Post-roll ads are amongst the most ineffective type of ads simply because they play after the content has finished and a viewer has no motivation to watch them. Marketing companies tend to avoid these types of ads and favor mid and pre-roll ads.

Some Guidelines for In-stream Video Ads:

Make these ads 15-30 seconds
Disable fast forward options
Use a 16:9 or 4:3 ratio (16:9 is the most commonly used)

In addition to YouTube, Hulu, Netflix and HBO, social media platform Facebook has also adopted in-stream ads.

Marketing companies have to know what kind of ads to use for each platform, because the right ad will lead to the desired results. If your brand needs help with advertising, don’t hesitate to contact us here at Fusion 360 Agency. Marketing is what we do best and we’re always ready to help your brand make its digital footprint in the industry.

Feb 04
0

Four Secrets to Online Success

By | digital marketing, SEO, Utah, video production | No Comments

When you post any sort of content on the internet, it can go one of two ways: you can reach a good number of people and see a significant amount of interaction, or you can witness your post disappearing into the merciless void that is the internet. What it all comes down to is how much time you take to prepare your content; online success doesn’t come easy, and social media marketing companies know that it takes a lot of work to see good results.

It’s important for brands to prepare and optimize their content wisely if they hope to claim any online success, but we realize that there are some companies out there that may require the assistance of professional social media marketing companies. Here are four secrets to online success that will help your brand blossom and give you the results that you’re looking for.

Understand Your Own Vision

The first secret to online success is taking the time to understand your own vision. In order to achieve great online success, both the brand and the social media marketing company need to know what their goals are and how to accomplish them.

Know Where Your Customers Are

Online success also comes down to pinpointing where your customers are spending their time online. Of course, this depends on your services and or products. If your brand sells sporting goods and supplements, you’ll want to target other pages and users in the sports industry. Once you start to pick up steam, you can begin recruiting affiliates within that community to help advertise your brand; online success is all about branching out.

Come Up with an Endpoint

Aside from just understanding your vision and ensuring that your short-term goals are met, successful companies also need to have an end goal in mind. Without a specific long-term goal in mind, you’re going to find it harder to motivate your brand and create quality and optimized content. Long-term goals serve as guidelines for everything that is produced within your company.

Go All in with Your Time

Lastly, you can’t achieve online success without going all in with your efforts. One of the biggest mistakes that companies make is treating their online efforts as a part-time job. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and your online presence won’t be either. The best way to achieve online success is to treat your social media like a full-time job ⎯ if you can do that, you should have no problem seeing positive results.

If you’re looking to achieve online success but don’t know where to start with these secrets, contact our talented social media marketing team at Fusion 360 Studios. We can help grow your brand to its full potential.

Feb 03
0

Three Common Flaws You Will See in Lower Quality Videos

By | SEO, Social Media, Utah, video production | No Comments

DIY video production has become more and more popular as we’ve been exposed to higher grade video equipment, editing software and production equipment. As a result, in an addition to seeing a significant increase in the amount of video content that goes out onto the internet, we also see more videos that should be high-quality but are not.

While it is true that anyone in the world can upload video content to the internet, it’s also worth noting that not every video online is going to be good or even decent. The fact of the matter is, the online videos you see that are truly high-quality are likely produced primarily by super talented professionals and video production companies.

You can’t deny that when you’re watching a poor-quality video that you just want scratch your eyes out or maybe even plug your ears. Unfortunately, in a time where we have fancy cell phone cameras and software available to create visual masterpieces, everyone becomes a self-proclaimed video expert, photographer or professional. We are here right now to help anyone to recognize common flaws and make sure they avoid making the same mistake themselves.

Not Using Proper Microphones

One of the biggest mistakes you can make in video production is poor audio recording. Just like you would invest in a good quality camera, you should always make sure to use a high-quality microphone when filming anything! Your audience doesn’t want to listen to static, poppy, unintelligible dialogue, and neither do your editors.

There are countless options when it comes to microphones; video production companies trust brands such as Rode, Audio Technica and Shure to capture crisp, clean and audible sounds.

Using Too Much Digital Zoom

Zooms and Close Up shots are crucial in video production, but there is a better way to get a closer look at that important object or person than always using the digital zoom on a camera. One other huge mistake that DIY video production individuals may make is not taking the time to physically get closer to a subject for zooms and close-ups. When you zoom in digitally, you’re basically taking the same image and stretching it out, which can lead to pixilation and a loss of quality.

Professional video production companies recommend that you get up close and personal to capture intense and beautiful close up shots; you won’t sacrifice quality and your video won’t look bad.

Editing Mishaps

This is probably one of the worst things you can do in the world of video production. Uploading footage with mistakes in the editing is probably the best way to ensure your video’s failure. You have to take all your clips and run them through an intensive editing team to clean them up; even the best video production companies have to edit their work together, and it is definitely nothing to be ashamed about. In fact, double checking your work in the editing process will not only ensure that your video comes out crisp, but also a second set of eyes on the work. This second set of eyes might provide some good feedback and thoughts on how to make the video look even better.

So, if you’re looking to create a successful visual masterpiece, you’ll want to make sure that you don’t make these three common mistakes. If you need help creating a high-end video for your brand, make sure to give us a call here at Fusion 360 Studios ⎯ video production is what we do best, and that will show in your next production.

Jan 28
0

Social Videos vs. Brand Videos

By | Social Media, Utah, video production | No Comments

Video content is one of the driving forces of today’s digital world, and with the ever-expanding video styles, it is confusing when you try to distinguish the difference between all the entangled video formats. You might feel confident in recognizing and defining a social video, but what about a brand video? And are you sure that brand videos are never used as a social video?

Well, if you are confident in answering that, then hats off to you but if you have any uncertainty, then let a video production company, like us, start unraveling for you.

Difference

As mentioned before, it’s not hard to recognize a social video, but that might be because you are likely seeing them as you are peruse through one of the many social media channels. Immediately, you’ll see that these videos are shorter in length — whether it be a 5-second ad on YouTube or a 10-15 second story on Instagram, the content is delivered quickly. These videos can be a little longer if they are making a formal post then they can run up to a minute or two depending on the type of post, but rarely will they ever exceed a two or three-minute mark.

These videos can be behind the scenes, short PR blips featuring something new, interviews, and videos that enclose some kind of question or giveaway. The majority of the content posted on various social channels by companies may not need a high-quality video from some video production company but occasionally it might be nice to promote something that requires a higher level of production. Typically, a higher-quality video like this would be a little longer and be used specifically for branding purposes, but usually social videos are just used for current consumers to interact with and stay engaged with the company; the brand videos purpose are a little different.

Brand videos are used to help potential client and customers to learn more about a company. Usually, a company that is making a brand video will reach out to professional video production companies to help them create the quality these videos need. Essentially, brand videos create a first impression; even when an individual or client may be familiar with the company before they see a brand video, the video will likely provide new information and therefore create an impression. These videos can be a little bit longer and usually feature the company as a whole or a specific product. While some brand videos are used as commercials on television, you’ll actually find brand videos on companies’ websites and being used in presentations with potential clients.

One Better Than Others?

To summarize, the main difference between a brand video and social video is their purpose. While there are obvious differences in length, quality and style, the social videos are used for engagement and navigating traffic to the company, and brand videos are used as a formal way to present valuable information about the company and/or product. It really is not a question of whether one is better than another, they are both different and should both be utilized. Creating the majority of social videos might be able to be taken care of in-house, but brand videos will have a lot more success (which is critical, obviously) if a video production company assists.

If you want to see some examples of brand videos, then check out this video from Smith or this one from Apple — they both explain who their companies are and a critical aspect about what makes them unique. If you want to see a social video, well, go to Instagram and look up a company of your choice and there you go! For any other video questions or inquires for a video production company, visit Fusion 360, today!

Aug 10
0

Is AI Taking Over Content Marketing

By | advertising, content marketing, Utah | No Comments

Content marketing is crucial for building a digital brand. Everything points back to the messages in the content. This is why, as an advertising agency in Utah, you’d want to hire a creative team that is capable of producing genuine and relevant content for your clients.

With recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI), experts are discovering how AI can make content creation more efficient. But many fear AI will “take over” in a negative way.

Should We Be Excited or Afraid?

The big question everyone is asking is whether or not AI will be a major game-changer in the near future. The realistic answer is no. AI isn’t going to take over the world anytime soon — knock on wood. However, AI is capable of many things including, writing generic content and analyzing market data, but so far AI lacks the empathy and emotion that humans need.

That doesn’t mean AI won’t have its place in content marketing. It has the potential to be a valuable tool for content teams. AI is good at following orders and completing templated jobs quickly and consistently. This is something that some agencies are already utilizing. Especially those industries that create data heavy, scientific content.

That being said, with the type of advancements we are seeing in the world of AI, we should be excited. The development of AI is going to expand the abilities of content marketing companies. Instead of focusing on monotonous tasks, your creative team can focus on the content that really matters — the content that strikes a connection with people.

Content Is Still King

 As they say, “content is king.” Long live the king. The development of AI isn’t a revolution to overthrow that hierarchy anytime soon. Rather, AI is another pillar of support to elevate content creation. Consequently, from this elevated content, brands will be able to better present themselves through modern mediums.

Sources:

http://www.econtentmag.com/Articles/News/News-Feature/How-AI-is-Impacting-Content-Marketing-119095.htm

https://scrunch.com/blog/5-reasons-why-content-is-king/

 

Jul 17
0

Advertising and Technology – The Battle for Power

By | advertising, content marketing, digital marketing, SEO, Social Media, Utah, web development | No Comments

Written by Ascari Pena

 

In 2017, we are seeing the mass emergence of many different technological platforms such as Virtual Reality (VR), self-driving cars and dominance of non-traditional television platforms such as Netflix and Hulu. With this technology changing how we interact with media, products will emerge and others will fall. Innovation is the name of the game.

Our media consumptions habits are changing daily and large tech companies such as Facebook and Google are having larger pressures from large businesses to deliver higher quality ad-serving platforms. On the opposite side, advertising and marketing agencies are competing for business and trying to drive growth of their clients through SEO and content marketing.

To further prove the shift to digital platforms, digital ad spending overtook TV for the first time ever in 2016; experts say this is due to the Summer Olympics and the Presidential election. Globally, TV is still leading in ad spending. While many in the advertising arena would like to debate which one is more effective, the shift to digital is real and advertisers need to recognize this.

Apps and Ads

Large companies with billions of dollars in an advertising budget such as McDonald’s are now turning straight to social platforms such as Snapchat to assist in the marketing of their brand to allure teens to apply for jobs.

While this is becoming a trend for major corporations, these prominent social platforms are now having to provide scalable advertising analytics for their dollars spent. Scaling the analytics for advertising campaigns has been a thorn in the hide of Facebook, Google, Snapchat and Twitter.

With the freedom of the internet also comes the one percent that ruin it for the rest of us. In March 2017, major brands such as Honda pulled their advertising from YouTube as their ads were appearing on extremist websites and other content they deemed to be inappropriate to their brand.

While these platforms have nearly all the attention, there is demand from users and advertisers to create systems to filter out hate speech and the new trend of ‘fake news’ through development of algorithms.

Traditional Advertisers

While we are consuming media at an all time high, traditional media spenders need to think long and hard about where they are placing their advertising dollars. Unlike previous generations, Millennials and Generation Z’s have no problem tuning out your annoying 30-second spot on TV.

While traditional television advertising works to reach a broad audience, it does not have the granular analytics that digital platforms do. If an advertising agency is to spend on traditional mediums, the creative must be engaging and provide value to the viewer, or they will be tuned out faster than the latest Nickelback album.

When evaluating where to spend your ad dollars, auditing your ad spend and re-strategizing with an advertising agency like Fusion 360 in Salt Lake City, Utah may be your best option.