Wondering if your business should have a YouTube presence? Have you tried publishing on YouTube but it hasn’t done anything for your business?

Why Businesses Should Consider YouTube

There are two key reasons businesses should consider marketing on YouTube.

The first is the SEO benefits. While YouTube itself can help reach your target audience, combining it with the power of its parent company Google can give you an SEO boost. Let’s say you have a YouTube video that’s performing well and uses well-researched keywords. If you embed it in a blog post with similar keywords, it can drive up the potential for both pieces of content to reach their objectives.

Embedding a YouTube video into a blog post can also boost time on site, which is an important signal to Google that it’s a quality piece of content. If people start spending more time than average on an article with an embedded video, that’s going to help both the article and the video.

If you create content in both the written word and video, the combination can be very powerful. It doesn’t matter whether you create the video or the blog post first—everybody’s brain works differently so choose the approach that works for you. It’s an easy way to create two forms of content that are both going to help you.

The other key benefit to YouTube is the longevity of the content. For most of social media, your content’s shelf life is brief, but on YouTube, your content can be consumed for years to come. You can publish a video today that doesn’t perform well, but in a year or two, it may take off. Someone today could be watching one of your videos from 2 years ago and be turned onto you as a brand.

Jessica did a video about iMovie 3 years ago that’s still in her top 10 today. Older videos like that are continuing to help her grow her list and get in front of people she wouldn’t have been able to reach otherwise.

YouTube is a content machine. They want users to stay on the platform so they continually suggest additional videos for viewers to watch. They know when someone’s watching a video on Clubhouse, for instance, that they might want to watch another video on Clubhouse. If your video is included in suggested content, you can reach a massive new audience that you might not be able to reach otherwise. It’s amazing how long the tail is on YouTube content.

YouTube Can Work for Any Business

Almost any kind of business can benefit from YouTube. For instance, a real estate agent in Tennessee, which is obviously a location-specific business, made YouTube work for her. She created a strategy where she starting sharing her expertise in topics such as how to buy a house and answering questions like, “What is escrow?” Later, she ended up building out courses and education in that niche but YouTube helped her become a go-to resource.

As her channel grew, her brand grew. People from her area started recognizing her because they found her on YouTube as they were searching for answers to questions she was answering in her content. She was able to rank for “real estate agent in Nashville, Tennessee” because she leveraged the SEO benefit. YouTube helped her not only grow the local side of her business but also hit record numbers on the education side.

Roger Wakefield, a plumber in Texas, started a YouTube channel for a similar reason: to improve his SEO and help people find him. In the beginning, his YouTube channel didn’t do much for his business but it eventually took off.

Then a national plumbers’ association asked him to start speaking and he began training other plumbers on how to get into the plumbing business.

#1: How to Avoid the Biggest Mistake Marketers Make on YouTube

The YouTube algorithm’s job is to pair the right viewer with the right content so the viewer stays on the platform. If you’re sending people off of the platform too much, YouTube will look unfavorably upon that. You might still be able to grow your business from YouTube but not at the rate you could be if you took your foot off the gas a bit.

Remember, YouTube is a business. They have advertisers that pay them billions of dollars and they need to keep them happy. If you’re constantly sending people off of the platform, YouTube will diminish your reach and your videos won’t be seen as much. If you look at your analytics, you may see that people are viewing your content and you’re doing everything right, but it can be problematic if they’re not extending their session on the platform.

At this point, you might be thinking, “I work for a business and my job is to sell the business. How’s that going to work?”

What it comes down to is the same thing as with any social media platform. If you’re constantly on Instagram asking people to buy your products, that’s not an effective strategy. A better approach is a soft sell. Eighty percent of the time, your YouTube content should be about giving to your audience—teaching, helping, and providing value—which will help build your brand. The other 20% of the time, you can ask your audience for something.

While 80% of your videos may not get people to download your freebie or buy your product, they prove to YouTube that your content can keep people on the platform. This mitigates the impact of the 20% of videos where you ask viewers for something.

In your 20% where you’re hard-selling those opt-ins, you can tell readers to go click on this link and display cards in your video that people can click. Just make sure you only use endcards and endscreens when you’re doing the hard sell, not in the 80% where you’re giving to your audience. That way it won’t hurt your analytics too much.

#2: How to Do a Soft Pitch on YouTube

To do a soft pitch on YouTube, you might include an opt-in or freebie link on your About tab or in the video description. It’s a soft ask because you’re not physically sending people somewhere from within the video or disrupting the viewing session. They’re making that decision by digging deeper, going to the description, your channel page, or your About tab.

You can also put the link to your opt-in right on your YouTube cover image. Replace the website link with a direct link to an opt-in that’s aligned with what your audience wants. Make sure that the image draws attention to it, such as with an arrow or a graphic of what they’re going to get. Jessica has seen her opt-in rate skyrocket from this technique.

For all of your videos, make sure you mention things organically. As marketers, we sometimes forget we have resources that people actually want. In our heads, we’re focused on the one thing we want to mention but forget we have numerous other resources that our audience might need.

In your 80% videos where you shouldn’t be pitching and sending people off of the platform, you could say something like, “While I’m talking about [topic], I have a link below in the description where you can go check that out.” Just don’t pop it across the screen or draw a ton of attention to it because that would send viewers off the video with an easy click. Plus, because people have to work to get to your opt-in page to sign up, it’s a way to vet the people on your email list.

#3: How to Do a Hard Ask on YouTube

In the 20% of your videos where you do the hard ask, start by making sure the topic is going to do well on its own. Your YouTube analytics should give you a sense of what content will perform well with your audience. It needs to be a video you expect to do well because you’re already stacking the deck against it by sending people off of the platform with a hard ask.

Next, if possible, create or choose an opt-in that’s specific to the topic of that video, not just a generic opt-in you want to promote.

For instance, Jessica did a Trello tutorial a few years ago, and at the beginning of the video (after the standard hook and intro), she said, “We’re going to talk about Trello in this video. A lot of people have a hard time figuring out exactly how to make it work for them, so I’ve created some templates you can download for Trello. To grab those, you want to go to [website].”

She did it at the beginning and end and linked it in cards and the description. The freebie also fit really well with the topic.

In addition to a clickable link on the card, it’s also helpful to put the URL across the screen and tell viewers that the link is in the description because mobile users might have a hard time clicking on the card or seeing the URL.

At the end of the video, you can make your hard ask part of your closing statement (in the last 20 seconds or so). Where normally you might wrap things up and ask viewers to subscribe, remove that piece and throw in another: “Don’t forget, grab these templates that I’ve created.” Pop the URL on the card, put another URL across the screen, and tell them again about the link in the description. That way, it’s a hard ask.

There’s also an opportunity to sell directly on YouTube; however, it shouldn’t be something expensive like a $1,000 course. Rather, selling low-cost offers is a no-brainer as long as it’s in the 20% of your 80/20 split. Jessica has had a lot of success selling low-cost offers directly from YouTube videos. But again, the ask needs to be paired with a video you know is going to do well.

For example, Jessica did a video about GoodNotes for iPad, which is a digital planner that works similarly to a paper planner with clickable tabs for easy navigation. She knew a video on this topic would perform well with her audience on YouTube and there weren’t a lot of competing how-to videos on the topic.

Before she published the video, she designed her own planner, which she then used in the tutorial. She knew her audience would be interested in her planner so this was a hard sell video: “By the way, this is a planner I designed. I’ll put the link below.” Within its first 2 months, that video not only increased her subscriber rate significantly but she also earned $10,000 in revenue from that $27 product.

If your YouTube channel is in a growth phase right now and you’re doing 100% give videos, how would you flip the switch and start doing some of the 20% videos? In all of your YouTube videos, you want to include a call to action. Most of the time, it’s a YouTube-specific call to action—subscribe, thumbs up, comment. When you start doing 20% videos, replace those calls to action with your hard ask and actually tell viewers to click the link in the card (or the description) to get the freebie.

You can say, “I created this free guide. Go to [this address] to get it.” That’s when you’ll really see an impact.

Jessica Stansberry is the host of the Hey Jessica podcast and founder of Hey Jessica, a company designed to help businesses grow with YouTube. Her courses include YouTube Rock Stars and the YouTube Starter Toolkit. Connect with Jessica on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Clubhouse.

Other Notes From This Episode

• Check out Roger Wakefield’s YouTube channel.
• Connect with Michael Stelzner at @Stelzner on Instagram.
• Follow Michael Stelzner on Clubhouse at @Stelzner and follow the Social Media Examiner Club.
• Sign up for the Social Media Marketing Society at smmarketingsociety.com.
• Watch exclusive content and original videos from Social Media Examiner on YouTube.
• Tune into our weekly Social Media Marketing Talk Show. Watch live on Fridays at 12 PM Pacific on YouTube. Listen to the replay on Apple Podcasts or Google Podcasts.

This article was co-created by Jessica Stansberry and Michael Stelzner.

The post USING YOUTUBE TO GROW A BUSINESS appeared first on Sirena Media.

With over 2.7 billion monthly active users and 1.82 billion daily users, Facebook is the largest social network in the world. What began as a way for college students to network has become an essential marketing tool for more than 90 million small businesses.

All of those users generate a lot of data.

To help companies harness the massive amount of information created within the platform, Facebook released their Insights tool, which shares data about the best day to post, the ideal time to post, and what posts are performing well.

If you’re marketing on Facebook, understanding how all those numbers relate to your business and audience can be confusing at first.

But worry not. This post explains how to analyze Facebook data to get valuable metrics about who’s coming to your page and clicking around. By the end, you’ll have a better understanding of how Insights can help you connect with both current and potential customers.

Running a new Facebook Business Page? Find everything you need to know to elevate your paid and organic efforts in this Facebook Marketing Course.

How to Analyze Facebook Data

Facebook Insights is separated into two main categories: Audience Insights and Page Insights.

• Audience Insights gives metrics about your Facebook audience, which helps you create relevant content, improve ad targeting, and attract more people to your Page.
• Page Insights shows analytics for your Page, so you can see which posts are performing well and which aren’t.

This post focuses on Audience Insights, to help you understand both existing and potential customers. For an in-depth look at how to gather information from Page Insights, check out this guide to Facebook Marketing.

To access the data gold mine in Audience Insights, you first have to create a business Page. Once your Page is set up, navigate to Audience Insights by clicking Analyze and Report in your Business Tools menu. Now comes the sleuthing. Pull up your company’s target audience profile for reference, because it’s time to do research.

Step 1: Choose your audience.

A pop-up will appear and ask you to pick between the following options:

• Everyone on Facebook: Start here for information to refine your target audience or attract new people to your Page.
• People connected to your Page: Click this one to learn more about everyone who likes your Page to see if your target audience is showing up.

This part requires some strategy. Are you using Insights to build a buyer persona, see if your strategy is attracting the right people, learn about your audience’s interests, or something else entirely? By having a goal in mind, it’s easier to put the information to use.

Step 2: Filter to fit your goals.

With your goal set, it’s time to narrow down the audience. You can filter based on:

1. Location
2. Age and gender
3. Interests
4. Page connections

1. Location

Knowing where in the world your audience lives is helpful for many reasons. If you’re an online shop looking to expand, maybe you want to learn whether a specific country is interested in your products.

If your company has a physical location, select your city for relevant local metrics. And if you’re not bound to any location constraints, keep it open by including countries worldwide.

2. Age and gender

All Facebook users must be 18 years and older, so keep that in mind when evaluating audiences. If you have a specific buyer persona you’re researching, filter according to that age range.

But if you’re looking to expand your audience, it’s worthwhile to extend your age range or consider both genders to see if you’re missing out on potential customers.

3. Interests

This is where filtering gets fun — and a little complicated. Keep your search broad by selecting a handful of common interests, like food and reading, or select dozens of interests for a focused pool of people.

You have freedom to play with drop down filters or type anything that comes to mind into the search bar. Cooking, Entertainment, Adventure, Flying, Tech, Cake.

The list goes on, so let your imagination run wild. Just keep an eye on the number of people in your audience as you refine. If it drops below 1,000 people, Facebook won’t populate the data.

4. Page Connections

This filter shows the top “liked” Pages by people within your audience profile. If you’re scouting for competitors, this can let you know who to watch. Maybe you’re looking for content inspiration, and browsing connected Pages will give you ideas for a campaign collaboration or promotional giveaway. Either way, it’s good to know what other Pages pop up in your audience’s newsfeed.

Step 3: Understand your audience.

Sound the applause — you’ve filtered down your audience profile. Now it’s time to dig in further to four categories: Demographics, Page Likes, Location, and Activity.

Demographics

Facebook Insights lets you go beyond the basics to see audience information including Language, Relationship Status, Education, Job Titles, and Market Segments. Let’s say you’re a new food blogger targeting men ages 18-32.

If you plug in that information, you can get a detailed look at what your audience does for work, how educated they are, or even whether they’re primarily cooking for one or more people.

If your ideal audience turns out to largely be single with time-consuming office jobs, this can help focus your content strategy.

Maybe your audience would like a post about easy lunch ideas for work or meals that are even better as leftovers. I’m generalizing here, but the more you dig into demographics, the more data you have to hone your marketing efforts.

Page Likes

Similar to the Interests filter, this option shows what your audience likes. Check out the Top Categories to learn what people care about the most, with options like Movies, Charities, Companies, Music, Public Figures, News and Media, and Products.

Maybe those men whipping up meals for one are interested in TV series like “The Chef Show” or “Chef’s Table.” If you were to create a blog post round-up of your favorite cooking shows or episodes, it would likely do well among that audience. The key here is to look at what content is relevant both in and out of your industry to review competitors and connected interests.

Location

Use this filter to explore the top countries, cities, and languages of your audience profile. Say you’re based in the United States but discover your audience has a major presence in Montreal, Canada.

It could be worth adjusting your marketing efforts to include content that speaks to both Americans and Canadians. And if you do expand your audience, you may even consider adding a French language option to your website to cater to Québécois customers.

Activity

See how active your audience is compared to the average Facebook user. The most important information in this section is the activity within the past 30 days, broken down by actions like Comments, Posts Liked, Posts Shared, and Ads Clicked.

Maybe you’re interested in running Facebook Ads but are unsure if anyone in your audience would click. With the Activity data, you have a better idea of how many people would take action. For a more detailed look at how to analyze Facebook Ad performance, take a look at this guide to Facebook Advertising.

Explore more Facebook Insights

Now you can wield the power of Audience Insights to help you build buyer personas, hone in your target audience, and expand your customer reach. But if you’re on a research roll, you can explore more metrics under Page Insights to see how your content is performing, what people are resonating with, and what posts to promote.

So the next time you question whether you’re attracting the right followers or are looking for out-of-the-box ideas to engage your audience, pull up Facebook Insights and put the data to work.

The post HOW TO ANALYZE FACEBOOK DATA TO UNDERSTAND YOUR AUDIENCE appeared first on Sirena Media.

To learn about common Facebook ad mistakes and how to fix them, read the article below for an easy-to-follow walkthrough or watch this video:

#1: Selecting the Wrong Facebook Campaign Objective

The first big mistake that Facebook advertisers make is running traffic ads when they really want conversions.

Facebook knows all about the people who use the platform including their history of clicking on things and whether they’re likely to convert. If you want to reach people who have a history of providing their email address and phone number, you should be running conversion ads, not traffic ads.

Traffic ads are meant for reaching people who have a history of clicking things on Facebook but maybe not taking action. The traffic campaign objective can be well-suited for running ads to a podcast or your most recent blog posts, for example.

#2: Boosting Posts for Conversions

The second big mistake that Facebook advertisers make is running a boosted post and thinking they’ll get a lot of conversions. You’ll see a lot of engagement on the post but not necessarily large numbers of people leaving the platform, visiting your landing pages, and performing the actions you hope they’ll take.

So save your boosted posts for times when you want to increase the engagement on your post. Put the majority of your Facebook ad budget toward conversion ads.

Learn How to Increase Your Engagement and Sales with Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn. Experience in-depth live workshops!MARKETING WORKSHOPSSALE ENDS TUESDAY!LEARN MORE

#3: Using You and You’re

I’m putting this next big mistake into a category called the “unspoken rules of copywriting.”

Let me start with an insightful quote from the Harvard Business Review: “When it comes to ad personalization, there’s a fine line between creepy and delightful.” If you take that to heart, you’ll understand why Facebook wants ads that are relevant but not targeted.

In your Facebook ad copy, avoid using the words you and your too often. While those words work well in email marketing, the Facebook algorithm doesn’t favor ads that are full of them.

So instead of saying, “Do you want to scale your business with ads?”, you could reframe it as, “The fastest-growing businesses are scaling with ads. Click here to learn more.” See the subtle difference? When you scale back the use of “you” and “your” in your Facebook ad copy, you’ll likely see a big difference in your success rate.

#4: Lacking Sensitivity to Certain Niches

Some advertisers don’t have a good understanding of the sensitivities around Facebook’s niches, which include money, health, and relationships, among others.

Suppose you’re a franchiser looking for new store owners for your frozen yogurt shop. If you say something like, “You can earn an extra $10,000 a month with our franchise” in your Facebook ad copy, that would be a mistake. The issue is that Facebook doesn’t like advertisers using specific numbers in their copy.

A better ad would be, “Learn how our franchisees are building great businesses with our frozen yogurt stores.” You’re scaling it back a little bit and not making big promises or mentioning specific numbers.

Another sensitive niche on Facebook is health. When you talk about people’s health in your ads, be careful. You don’t want to call people out or make them feel bad in your ad copy. For instance, don’t say something like, “Lose all of that fat, and get rid of those extra 5 pounds.” Instead, you might reframe the ad by saying, “Feel fit and fabulous in 10 minutes a day.” The Facebook algorithm would look more favorably on that ad copy.

Another sensitive area on Facebook is relationships. Avoid talking about how people might feel lonely or disconnected in your ads. Instead, put a positive spin on your audience’s problems. Talk about how somebody might look forward to the right relationship and building a deeper connection.

Even if your business isn’t in one of these sensitive niches, be cognizant that Facebook wants more positive interactions for their users. That doesn’t mean you can’t reference pain points on the platform—you absolutely can—but make sure you give people hope and optimism for their future.

Bonus: Avoid These Words in Your Facebook Ad Copy

I want to share a list of words I’ve found to create the most trouble with Facebook and Instagram ads. If your ads aren’t performing well and you have some of these words in your ad copy, try removing them and see if that improves your situation.

In addition to the problematic words “you” and “your,” you may have issues if you use gender identification in your ads or reference age, religion, or political leanings. Even the words “Facebook” and “Instagram” often cause trouble when used in ad copy.

Also avoid using curse words or fake curse words. They sometimes slip by the algorithm but they usually get caught.

Talking about health products like CBD or HCG is off-limits as well. If you reference dieting, weight loss, fat, or fat reduction in your ad copy, don’t include specific numbers or promises—those would be considered claims. Also avoid the word “double;” for example, “double your growth” or “double your revenue.”

Likewise, avoid “step-by-step,” “grow,” “money,” “financial freedom,” “wealth,” “laptop lifestyle,” “working from home,” or “quitting your job.” Facebook doesn’t want to be responsible if someone sees an ad telling them they can quit their job and then they quit their job but the opportunity doesn’t work out. Facebook doesn’t want to deal with a lawsuit that might stem from that.

Additionally, there’s a long list of words and expressions that marketers and business owners have been using for a long time that needs to be phased out and the Facebook algorithm is supporting that. Some of these trigger words are “slave,” “master”, “blacklist,” and “whitelist.” So don’t say something like, “Are you a slave to your workout?” in your Facebook ad copy. Ads that include these words or phrases are getting increasingly more expensive or aren’t working at all.

The bottom line is just to be careful about the types of words and expressions you’re using in your Facebook ads.

Conclusion

If your Facebook ads keep getting rejected or are more expensive than they should be, you might be making some obvious mistakes that impact your ad account. These include choosing the wrong objective for your campaign, using certain words and phrases in your ad copy, and misunderstanding the sensitivities around Facebook’s niches. Avoiding these mistakes will make your ads more effective and less expensive.

What do you think? Are you making any of these mistakes in your Facebook advertising? Do you have any to add to this list? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

The post COMMON FACEBOOK AD MISTAKES AND HOW TO FIX THEM appeared first on Sirena Media.

Whoever said “You never have a second chance to make a great first impression,” makes a valid point. You only get one opportunity to have your first interaction with another person … and the last thing you want is for that first interaction to be a bad one. After all, humans are known to remember negative experiences more vividly than positive ones.

Great first impressions matter when meeting someone, going to a new place, and even visiting a website.

In a world where virtually every business has a website, creating a positive first impression when your target audience members click on your site via the search engine results page (SERP) is critical. That’s because your landing page is your site’s “destination page”, or the first page that visitors land on when they open your site.

Also, to really put the pressure on, you only have about 7 seconds to make that great first impression with your website before the average visitor decides whether or not they’re going to stay or bounce elsewhere.

So, how do you ensure that the first interaction your target audience has with your website is a positive one?

The answer: Great landing page design.

1. Landing Page Design
2. Responsive Design
3. How to Design a Landing Page
4. Landing Page Design Best Practices
5. Landing Page Design Software

Landing Page Design

Landing page design is the process of creating an enticing site page for your target audience and website visitors. It should encourage them to convert from leads into subscribers or customers. Effective landing page design is on-brand, includes your product or service and company information, and incorporates relevant offers and calls-to-action (CTAs).

Responsive Design

You may have also heard about responsive design, or responsive web design, before.

A web page with responsive design is automatically viewable via any device — meaning, web pages change as needed to fit any screen or device (i.e. desktop, laptop, tablet, or smartphone).

Source

Since so many more people search the Internet from different devices and locations, responsive design is necessary to ensure visitors and customers have a pleasant experience on your site.

Although it’s recommended that your entire website is responsive, it’s critical to have responsive landing page design — again, this is the first page every visitor interacts with and sees when they open your website, so outstanding user experience (UX) is crucial. 

Web pages without responsive design can make for a frustrating experience for visitors — they’ll be dealing with images and text that don’t fit their screen. This can potentially cause visitors to abandon your site completely or even visit a competitor’s site instead.

Note: Depending on the landing page design software you choose to work with (we’ll cover some options shortly), responsive design might be an automatic feature for you. In this case, you won’t have to worry about responsive design — when you design your landing page, it’ll already be responsive.

In addition to having a responsive design, there are many other aspects of creating and designing a landing page that impact your ability to convert visitors into customers and enhance UX. So, let’s review some of the most common and important steps for you to take into consideration while designing your landing page.

How to Design a Landing Page

1. Identify your target audience and their needs.
2. Ensure the landing page has a specific purpose.
3. Choose a landing page design software.
4. Write enticing landing page headers.
5. Make the landing page beautiful and helpful.
6. Publish and test the landing page design.

1. Identify your target audience and their needs.

No matter which part of your business you’re working on, you should be thinking about who your target audience is and how you can resolve their pain points — and designing your landing page is no exception to this rule of thumb.

While planning your landing page design, think about what your target audience expects and needs to see when they open your site. Ask yourself the following questions to help you with this:

• What questions does the landing page immediately need to answer for your audience?
• How can you brand your landing page so your audience knows they’re in the correct place?
• What attention-grabbing headline, relevant content, and CTA can you include on your landing page to efficiently and effectively meet the needs of your audience?
• How can you ensure your landing page is unique in comparison to those of your competitors?
• How can you prove the value that your company, products, and services provide to your audience?

If you need additional help thinking about who your target audience is, try creating buyer personas for your business.

2. Ensure the landing page has a specific purpose.

For your landing page design to be successful, it needs a clear purpose. When visitors come to your landing page, they should immediately know why the page exists.

For example, you can use landing page design to clearly define the purpose of your page in the following ways:

• Increase conversions by sharing relevant CTAs
• Enhance brand awareness by including an email newsletter sign-up form
• Boost sales by displaying your top-selling product
• Develop greater interest in your product or service by incorporating information about how they solve your visitors’ pain points

Without a defined landing page purpose, your visitors may feel confused about what to do once they’ve landed on the page or uncertain about whether or not they’re in the right place. This may cause them to lose interest and abandon your page entirely. So, use your design to ensure your landing page has a clear purpose.

3. Choose a landing page design software.

There are dozens of software options made to help you build and design a landing page. The key is finding one that works for you. Review the five software options we recommend below and the various features they each offer below.

4. Write enticing leading page headers.

The purpose of a header is to catch your visitors’ attention and/or make them want to do something — meaning, headers should be enticing, impactful, and action-oriented.

This is most likely one of the very first (if not the first) things your website visitors will have read about your company. For this reason, your landing page headers should also complement the tone and copy everywhere else on your site (and your meta description).

When you use enticing and value-driven vocabulary in your landing page headers, you ensure your visitors know they’re going to get something worthwhile out of converting and spending time on your site.

For example, look at HubSpot’s Buyer Persona Generator landing page. The headline says, “Make My Persona … A Buyer Persona Generator From HubSpot.” Thanks to the header, visitors know where they are and what they’ll get out of visiting the landing page.

Source

Visitors are then automatically directed to the second part of the landing page which also includes enticing and value-driven language.

Source

The design includes two CTAs visitors can click based on their needs and interests. The headers on this landing page are useful, relevant, eye-catching, and on-brand

5. Make the landing page beautiful and helpful.

We’ve talked a lot about the fact your landing page is the first thing your website visitors are going to see when they open your website. So, in addition to compelling headers and language, you also want your page to be beautiful and helpful.

Make your landing page beautiful by:

• Incorporating consistent, on-brand colors and fonts
• Keeping your page organized
• Remembering less is more while designing
• Including aesthetically-pleasing visuals (images and/or videos)
• Designing obvious and exciting CTAs

Make your landing page helpful by:

• Incorporating content that pertains to your target audience’s needs and challenges
• Designing CTAs that provide visitors with value
• Including information that tells visitors why they should convert
• Making sure visitors know how to convert
• Ensuring visitors have easy access to your contact information

6. Publish and test your landing page design.

Once your design set, it’s time to publish and test it among your audience members. After your landing page is published, you can A/B test different design elements (e.g. colors, CTA buttons, phrases, font, etc.) to see which options lead to the highest number of conversions.

This way, you can ensure your landing page meets your audience’s needs while also guaranteeing you’re getting the best results that will impact your business’s bottom line.

In addition to keeping these landing page design steps in mind, consider these landing page best practices as well. You’ll notice some of these best practices are also directly tied to the specific steps we’ve just reviewed above.

Landing Page Design Best Practices

1. Identify your target audience and their needs.
2. Write a compelling and helpful headline.
3. Include unique and engaging visuals.
4. Keep it simple.
5. Make sure it has a responsive design.
6. Keep it on-brand.
7. Optimize it with CTAs.
8. Add your contact information.
9. Include live chat on the landing page.
10. Use A/B testing to determine which design works best.

While we review the following best practices, we’ll be referencing the following annotated image of HubSpot’s landing page: 

1. Remember your audience throughout the design process.

As we reviewed above, the first part of designing your landing page is identifying your target audience — Remember to keep them in mind throughout the design process. This way you’ll create a design and incorporate content that resonates with your audience. By doing so, you’ll have a larger chance of increasing conversions among site visitors.

2. Write a compelling and helpful headline.

Add a compelling headline to your landing page to immediately grab your visitors’ attention. A great landing page headline should be eye-catching and helpful.

For example, HubSpot’s landing page says, “There’s a better way to grow.” This headline gets visitors in the mindset of HubSpot being something they need to improve and expand their business.

Additionally, “grow better” is a saying HubSpot uses throughout all marketing materials. It’s something the company works to do every day — to help other businesses grow better. This makes the headline on-brand too (which is another best practice we’ll talk more about momentarily).

3. Include unique and engaging visuals.

Include engaging visual content on your landing page. Whether it’s a photo, video, or animation, you want your landing page design to somehow pique the interest of your visitors.

The HubSpot landing page’s visual content is unique to the company — the animated design and colors are on-brand. They also don’t take attention away from the written content on the page.

4. Keep it simple.

Although you want to include a headline, written content, CTA, and visual content on your landing page, that doesn’t mean you want your design to be too busy. In fact, you want the opposite.

Remember: Less is more when it comes to the design of your landing page (and your entire website for that matter). This keeps things clean, organized, and simple to understand and navigate for your visitors.

As you can see on HubSpot’s landing page, although the visual takes up a lot of the page, the headline, written content, and CTA are organized in a simplistic and aesthetically-pleasing way.

The navigation at the top of the page is minimalist and the live chat on the bottom right can collapse to make the landing page appear even cleaner for visitors.

5. Make sure it has a responsive design.

Remember, the chances of your website visitors, leads, and customers visiting your website via a mobile device or tablet is high. So, ensure your landing page has a responsive design that automatically changes format based on the device it’s being viewed on.

For example, here’s what HubSpot’s landing page looks like via my iPhone. As you can see, all of the content is the same and it includes the same CTA and visuals, but it’s organized and formatted in a way that fits my screen.

Source

6. Keep it on-brand.

When a visitor comes to your landing page, they should automatically know it belongs to your business. Brand your landing page in a way that complements the rest of your marketing content, logo, and colors. Your visitors should be able to immediately know your landing page belongs to your business due to the branding you incorporate.

HubSpot’s landing page does this well — it adheres to the requirements found in HubSpot’s Brand Guidelines. The HubSpot logo lives at the top of the landing page.

7. Optimize your landing page with CTAs.

Your landing page should include at least one relevant CTA, located above the fold (meaning, visitors don’t have to scroll to get to the form because it’s in view as soon they hit the page), so visitors can come to your landing page and convert within seconds. This CTA might be used to learn more about your product or service, purchase your product, sign up for a special offer, or subscribe to your email newsletter.

HubSpot’s CTA button is one of the most obvious features on the landing page. The CTA button clearly states what visitors get out of converting. Since the CTA button has the word “free” in it, it becomes even more enticing … who doesn’t love free? Lastly, it’s located above the fold of the page, so it’s visible to everyone the moment they open it.

8. Add your contact information.

Your visitors may come directly to your site in search of your contact information or determine they want to contact you for assistance or support after spending some time on your page.

To avoid wasting their time and causing them any unnecessary frustration while trying to locate your contact information, place these details on your landing page. This keeps the process of contacting you as simple and straightforward as possible for your visitors.

HubSpot has contact information listed under the navigation bar at the top of the landing page. This is a great option if you’re looking to keep your landing page as minimalist as possible.

9. Include live chat on the landing page.

If possible, include a live chat function on your landing page. This way, visitors can get the immediate assistance they want and need from the moment they open your page.

HubSpot’s landing page has a live chat feature for easy access to immediate support. The location of the collapsible chat box keeps the page looking organized.

Once you’ve designed your landing page, don’t feel locked in — this is an iterative process. For instance, feel free to test your designs among your target audience to determine which colors, CTA buttons, headlines, visuals, and written content resonate with them best (and result in the most conversions).

To do this, you may A/B test designs. After reviewing your results, you’ll know which design works best for your target audience and increases conversions — stick with that design until you have a new and improved design to share, your product line changes, or your branding is updated — then, start this process again.

Next, let’s take a look at the software options you have to get your landing page up and running so you can begin converting more visitors into customers.

Landing Page Design Software

There are many landing page design software options to choose from, all of which can help you design your entire website (not just your landing page). The following five options simplify the design process and don’t require you to have any previous web or design experience.

1. HubSpot Free Landing Page Builder

HubSpot’s free landing page builder helps you create multiple landing page designs for free. The software includes a free built-in library of responsive landing page templates and an on-page editor for adding images and copy.

When you upgrade to a paid plan, you can also create personalized CTAs, content, and forms for visitors to help you boost conversions. HubSpot also provides you with the ability to test and analyze the performance of your landing page design so you can make improvements.

2. Instapage

Instapage allows you to design and publish custom post-click landing pages with a variety of template options. The page builder is easy to use and offers the ability to A/B test different designs to determine which works best for your audience. The software also helps you optimize your landing page with dynamic text replacement so you can automate the opt-in content on your page.

3. Unbounce

Unbounce has a landing page creator with over 100 templates to choose from so your design complements your brand and content. Templates are organized by business type and include options for SaaS companies, agencies, and ecommerce businesses. Unbounce landing pages are responsive and completely customizable.

4. Mailchimp

Mailchimp allows you to design your landing page in minutes, thanks to their drag-and-drop page builder. You can also set up your other website content to populate your landing page, further simplifying the design process. Add custom CTAs to entice your target audience to convert or sign up. And, if you need help personalizing your landing page, review and reference the variety of tutorial videos Mailchimp provides users.

5. Leadpages

Leadpages is a landing page design software with a drag-and-drop builder that makes it easy to customize your landing page to suit your brand, and you can A/B test your designs with the software to efficiently determine which option converts the most visitors.

As you begin thinking about your landing page design and working through the details we’ve provided in this guide, you may feel as though you need additional design inspiration. If this is the case, check out our blog post on great landing page design.

Download dozens of free landing page examples to inspire your business’s design.

Begin Designing Your Landing Page

Your landing page is the first thing any visitor who comes to your website sees and experiences. That’s why great landing page design is so important — it’s every visitor’s first impression of your website … and possibly their first impression of your business as a whole.

A great landing page has the power to help you generate more leads, close more deals, enhance your website’s user experience, impress visitors, and ensure your site has a professional, on-brand feel. Work through these landing page design steps and best practices above to ensure your landing page accurately represents your business and makes your leads want to become customers.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in August, 2017 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

The post EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT LANDING PAGE DESIGN appeared first on Sirena Media.

Want a deeper connection with your audience? Have you considered communicating stories visually in your marketing?

In this article, you’ll discover five ways to use visual content to tell stories that engage your audience.

What Is Visual Storytelling?

It’s common knowledge among psychologists, visual marketers, and behavioral specialists that around 93% of communication is nonverbal, hence the cliché, “A picture is worth a thousand words.”

But in a world in which brand communications are driven more than ever by visual content, new and powerful modes of visual communication are emerging all the time. In fact, 1 minute of video is worth 1.8 million words, according to Forrester Research. This makes it easy to see why audiences aren’t as willing to engage with text-driven content.

Visual storytelling is a strategy for using visual content to communicate a narrative. An effective piece of visual storytelling inspires an emotional response, educates the audience, and/or guides them to a particular conclusion. Visual storytelling can take place in a single piece of content—such as a motion graphic, infographic, or social media post—or it can be achieved over the course of several connected and complementary pieces of content.

Some businesses will share the story of their founding—the inspiration for their product or service and their leaders. If your business doesn’t have this kind of history to share, you may think your brand doesn’t have a compelling story.

Don’t worry; of course you have a story worth sharing. How will your product or service make the world a better place? How does it make life better for your customers? Tell the story of a real or hypothetical client using your product or service.

Your business has a story to tell but that story can no longer be told in long blocks of text. If you want your audience to listen, you need to harness the power of visual storytelling. Here are five ways you can do that with your visual content.

#1: Share Your Origin Story

As we’ve already established, there are lots of potential stories that your brand can tell. One of those narratives that holds a lot of potential for many businesses is their origin story.

This story may be about how your company was founded, why it was founded, or some combination of the two. What problems did the founder(s) see that they wanted to solve? Was there an epiphany? What challenges did the company have to overcome to get to where it is now?

The origin story is particularly suited to appearing in the form of a video or motion graphic, which can guide the viewer through a linear narrative in a more controlled way than interactive media, which tends to prioritize self-guided exploration.

That said, there really are no limits to the style in which such a video can be produced. The important thing is to find an approach that’s consistent with your brand.

Let’s take a look at two starkly different examples of visual storytelling employed to tell an origin story through video. It’s easy to see how these reflect the businesses they’re profiling.

How could the LEGO story be anything other than animated?

Still, the brilliance isn’t only in the choice of animation but also in the fact that this motion graphic is targeted to those most likely to use the product: Children. The motion graphic is framed almost like a fairy tale, such that children would be just as likely to watch it as adults. And their reaction is likely to be akin to enchantment, which is exactly the point. A brand’s origin story should inspire a more intimate connection with the viewer.

Burberry took a more cinematic approach to telling its origin story, using high-quality cinematography, braided imagery, musical overlay, and quick cuts akin to a film trailer:

The resulting video evokes the highly stylized, high-quality product itself, as well as the lifestyle that its wearers would probably not mind emulating.

Sure, videos and motion graphics are great media for telling your business’s origin story but they’re not the only way. If you have a rich 50-year history like the National Endowment for the Arts, a video that encompasses everything might prove way too long and detailed, risking losing the audience’s attention. So you might instead opt for an interactive approach to visual storytelling.

In the NEA’s case, they chose an interactive timeline that users could explore at their own pace.

This approach empowers the user to follow what interests them most—to co-create the story. Given that interactive content can greatly boost conversion rates, it’s a powerful tool for driving real engagement.

If you choose to use video or animated video to tell your brand’s origin story, a new problem arises: How can you make optimum use of these videos across all of your social channels? After all, on Instagram alone, the maximum video length for a post is 60 seconds, while it’s only 15 seconds for Instagram Stories. These limits vary from platform to platform. And it’s not just video length you have to worry about but also varying dimensions.

There are multiple approaches to solving this conundrum, and practically all of them have the added bonus of making your video go further. That is, there are multiple ways to repurpose a video or motion graphic for social media and other promotional purposes so you can get more return on your investment.

To visualize this, the LEGO video is populated with some pretty important characters, including the founder of the company himself, Ole Kirk Christiansen. When Christiansen fell upon hard times, he leveraged his carpentry skills to start building toys.

These characters can be reused again and again across LEGO’s promotional materials. They might be guides that lead people around a landing page or illustrations for an interactive infographic that tells the narrative differently. On social media you can tell a story in bits and pieces, focusing on individual characters in short GIFs, MP4s that are just snippets of the longer video, or in stills from the video.

For instance, imagine the following screenshot as a Twitter or Instagram post accompanied by the text, “Did you know that LEGO’s founder started the company making toys for his four sons?” You might then try to spark a conversation with a question: “What was your favorite toy as a child? (Besides LEGO, of course!)”

Just remember, you’ll need to adjust the dimensions of the still or screenshot depending on the platform on which it’s going to appear. To illustrate, for a typical square Instagram feed post, you may set the ratio as 1:1.

By repurposing your video, you can quickly and easily create multiple assets that will work across social channels and continue to drive traffic to your video over the long term.

You can take the same approach to sharing not only other stills but also data visualizations and short-form clips from the longer video. This will give it more traction over a longer period of time and ensure that the video is being used to its maximum potential across your social channels.

#2: Communicate Your Company’s Aspirations

Even if your business doesn’t have a particularly compelling origin story to share, you can still use the power of visual storytelling by illustrating what your business hopes to achieve. These aspirational narratives look beyond the goal of selling a product or service and focus on how that product or service or the business as a whole will make the world a better place.

Sharing a narrative of corporate responsibility—about how you’re giving back to your community or fighting for a worthy cause—is particularly effective with Generation Z, which comprises 32% of the world’s population, and thus is a significant (and growing) proportion of almost any business’s target audience.

As many marketing experts have already observed, Gen Z tends to prioritize brands that are socially conscious and work to give back to their communities. The success of such marketing efforts as the #LikeaGirl campaign from Always puts this in sharp relief.

So if your company is doing something inspiring that will make the world a better place, it’s time to share that story. Ben and Jerry’s is a great example of a brand that, instead of sharing their past, looks to pioneer a better future on multiple fronts. Ben and Jerry’s brings their mission of sustainable foods and responsibly sourced agriculture to the foreground in their marketing materials:

#3: Deliver Educational and Instructional Content

If you want to both capture and keep your audience’s attention, you need to offer something of real value to them. That’s why educational and instructional content can drive huge engagement on social media. In fact, 77% of B2B marketers are already using educational content to reach their audiences.

For instance, when insurance company PEMCO wanted to connect with two key target audiences—homeowners 35 and older, and a general group of people older than 20—they decided to develop a series of 15 short motion graphics to educate their audiences on home maintenance, safety, and other useful topics. The most popular of these motion graphics saw 12x more shares than their average posts.

Here’s one example from that visual storytelling campaign, a motion graphic on planning family fire drills:

Nonprofits find educational content to be particularly useful too. Entrepreneurial service organization digitalundivided wanted to educate their audience on America’s long history of Black and Latinx women entrepreneurs so they opted to design a motion graphic to highlight a few influential figures as part of their #WeAreLimitless campaign.

They also divided that motion graphic into several short-form MP4s, each highlighting one woman, that they could share across their social channels. Here’s one of them:

Still, this doesn’t mean digitalundivided couldn’t or shouldn’t share the full motion graphic as well. If you’ve created a motion graphic or video longer than a minute that you’d like to post on Instagram, there’s another option. If you post it as an IGTV video post, it will keep playing if audiences agree to keep watching (by clicking “Keep Watching on IGTV” after they’ve watched several seconds of the preview).

Here’s how to post a longer video as an IGTV video. First, upload your video to Instagram as you would any other post. Then tap Next.

If your video is longer than a minute, you’ll be prompted to choose between posting a short video and a long video. Choose the Long Video option.

Now choose a frame from the video to use as the cover of your IGTV video. This isn’t the same as the cover that will appear on your Instagram feed but it will form the basis of that image. So choose something that will work in a square format later on.

After you tap Next, you’ll need to choose a title and description for your post. The description will function much as any other Instagram post copy will. The title will appear just before it in your feed.

At this stage, make sure you tap Edit Profile Cover. This is where you’ll be able to adjust and re-center the IGTV cover you chose a few steps ago to optimize how it appears in your feed.

Now hit Post and away it goes!

Just remember, publishing the whole video doesn’t prevent you from sharing shorter snippets like those above. On the contrary, it allows you to get more traction from a single video.

#4: Illustrate Product Creation From Start to Finish

For some businesses, the production of their product is a whole story by itself. And there are a lot of potential reasons for sharing this story. Perhaps it involves an innovative technique or strategy. Perhaps you’re sourcing from sustainable materials or focusing on fair trade or other socially conscious practices. The possibilities really are endless.

When 3D printing company Carbon partnered with the sports equipment experts at Riddell, they wanted to create a football helmet that would not only be a custom fit for the wearer but safer too. The short-form animated videos they developed for their social media channels were also shared on a custom landing page designed to promote the collaboration.

Carbon was able to showcase firsthand the kind of expertise that goes into making each of their products, as well as show off what makes Carbon’s 3D printing technology truly unique. Here’s one of the resulting videos:

Videos and motion graphics aren’t the only visual media that can effectively illustrate the process of product development and creation. Infographics or mini-infographics for social media are also a great choice. In fact, if you produce a video like the Carbon/Riddell piece above, you can repurpose the artwork into still images that work across all of your social channels so you can tell your story in multiple ways, ensuring that it appeals to all of your audiences.

#5: Highlight Customer Stories

Visual storytelling isn’t always about putting your brand in the spotlight. Sometimes you want to empower your audiences and customers to tell stories of their own.

Encouraging user-generated content (UGC) on your social channels has huge marketing potential. After all, 70% of Generation Z say that YouTube influencers are more relatable than celebrities. Many of your customers are seeking authenticity in the form of real-life stories, not just stories that are curated by brands.

There are many ways to encourage and share UGC across social media. Visual content of this type seems to be the most effective by far, as photos of real people, cute pets, and real examples of your brand out in the world create a more human experience.

During the pandemic, UPS has made ample—and powerful—use of UGC by sharing the many notes and gifts of thanks that have been left for their drivers. This content works in tandem with the driver-operated Instagram and Facebook pages, UPS Dogs, which share photos of cute dogs along drivers’ routes. This type of content regularly generates thousands of likes on Instagram, usually receiving twice as many likes as brand-generated posts.

So ask your customers to share images of their experience with your product or service. Offering a reward—such as entering all images in a raffle to win a coupon or free product—can incentivize this kind of sharing. The more people who share, the more others will want to do the same.

Conclusion

Today’s businesses need to tell compelling stories and this is achieved most effectively through the use of visual content. These stories can take place in an instant—in a single, compelling social media post—or over time via multiple interwoven visual assets that together form a larger narrative arc.

The right approach for your business depends on what you want to achieve for your brand as a whole and in particular campaigns. Set clear goals and define your target audiences and you’ll be able to find the right visual medium to bring your story to life.

The post HOW TO USE VISUAL STORYTELLING IN YOUR MARKETING: 5 WAYS appeared first on Sirena Media.

In this article, you’ll find a deep dive into Facebook Live video Insights in the Creator Studio dashboard. Discover which metrics actually help you improve your Facebook lives and find out why most marketers get their data and measurement wrong. Check below the entire article that Luria Petrucci wrote to Social Media Examiner.

To learn how to analyze Facebook Live video in Creator Studio, read the article below for an easy-to-follow walkthrough or watch this video:

#1: View Facebook Video Insights in Creator Studio

Facebook Live video can be an effective tool for growing your audience and creating a loyal following but you need to know if it’s helping you reach your goals specifically. Looking at your insights data will help you optimize your Facebook Live videos to help you grow your business.

First, you need to understand where you can get analytics inside the Facebook ecosystem. You don’t get any analytics on your personal profile. In groups, you get group-specific analytics like how many members you have, whether engagement is going up or down, popular days and times for activity in your group, and who your most active members are; but you won’t get much data around retention or live video views or engagement.

For your Facebook business page, though, you’ll get all of the analytics you want—and probably more than you want. Creator Studio will give you general insights about your videos, as well as detailed data about individual videos.

To access Creator Studio, go to business.facebook.com/creatorstudio. When your Creator Studio dashboard opens, you’ll see some general Facebook video insights. Click Insights on the left-hand side to start digging into more analytics and information about your videos.

Performance Insights

The first Insights view you’ll see is about the performance of your Facebook video content in general. It will show your total minutes viewed for the last 28 days by default.

If you want to change this time period, click the date in the upper-left corner and select the last month or quarter or choose a custom date range.

Across the top of the page, you’ll see tabs for 1-minute and 3-second video views, engagement, and net followers.

The engagement graph is super helpful because you can see at a glance whether your engagement is going up or down over time. Are people showing up? Are they not?

Creator Studio also lets you view these insights on a more granular level. On the right, you’ll see options to filter this data by organic vs. paid, posted vs. cross-posted or shared, followers vs. non-followers, as well as live vs. video.

Loyalty Insights

Loyalty is one of the most important assessments of your audience engagement because it will tell you if people are coming back repeatedly because they like your video content. If you click the Loyalty tab under Insights, you’ll see your net followers and complete views.

Scrolling down on the page will reveal how many returning viewers you had and which videos they returned to. This data gives you an idea of what kind of video content you should keep creating. If people aren’t returning to a piece of content you thought they’d like, guess what? You need to make some adjustments.

Audience Insights

Next up is the Audience tab, which of course gives you a lot of information about your audience. Who are your viewers? Where are they watching from?

While this data won’t tell you much in terms of engagement, you can see how many engaged viewers you had in this period of time, where they’re from, what language they speak, and what their interests are.

Also look at the age and gender of your top audiences. In this case, the most engaged viewers are primarily men ages 35–44. So start targeting content to the types of people who are watching your videos.

Retention Insights

Click on the Retention tab to get a better understanding of where your video views are coming from.

Recommendations tells you if Facebook is recommending your videos after another video and reveals whether your followers are still interested in your content. You can also look at whether views are coming from shares as well.

The Average Time People Spend Watching section is a tricky one to garner some information from. I’ll talk about this more in-depth in a minute.

How Long People Are Watching is in the same vein as what I was just talking about. Don’t put too much pressure on yourself when it comes to these particular insights.

#2: View Insights for Individual Facebook Live Videos in Creator Studio

While your general insights will give you a great look at how your page is doing with all of your video content, you need to look at individual Facebook Live videos to understand how they’re performing. So find your most recent live video and click on it to see your insights.

Peak Live Viewers

Peak Live Viewers is one of the most important metrics to pay attention to so click on it to delve into the data for your live video. Is it increasing over time? Where is your peak happening? If your peak is happening right at the top of the stream—like this one is at 4 minutes and 45 seconds—that’s unusual. Most live videos peak at about 18–20 minutes in. You can adjust your content based on this information if it’s happening consistently in your broadcasts.

Minutes Viewed and 1-Minute, 10-Second, and 3-Second Views

Minutes Viewed is a stat to look at over time. Is it increasing? Because of the way Facebook tracks views and the nature of Facebook being a feed, this metric is actually pretty misleading, as with a lot of the analytics you’ll see for videos. This is why you can’t look at any of your video analytics in isolation.

Let me give you an example. For 1-minute, 10-second, and 3-second video views, a lot of that is because the feed is scrolling by and that’s not going to give you an accurate description of what’s actually happening.

Average Video Watch Time

Now let’s talk about Average Video Watch Time. In the image below, you can see that people are watching, but the video average percent watched shows 0%. Well, that can’t be the case. So again, use your brain, look at everything together, and you’ll get a more accurate description of what’s happening with your Facebook Live video.

Audience Retention

Next, let’s look at Audience Retention for individual videos. This graph will give you an indication of how long you’re keeping people watching your live video in general. The longer you keep them there, the better off you are.

In the retention graph below, people are dropping off dramatically right at the beginning of this live stream. So ask yourself why you aren’t holding their attention. Are you not engaging them right up front? They want to talk to you so are you not talking back to them? Find out what you can tweak in your live video to make this graph more stable.

Keep in mind that your audience retention graphs are going to show some drop-offs. Every retention graph I’ve ever seen for Facebook Live video has a big drop-off right in the beginning so don’t let that discourage you.

Engagement

Instead of analyzing confusing graphs to muddle your data-driven decisions, focus more on the engagement factors like comments and reactions—the actions taken by the people watching your live video.

Here, the Post Engagement data shows that 62 people liked this Facebook Live video, 13 people loved it, and one person gave a sad face—probably because of something that was said or they accidentally hit the sad face.

You can also see the total number of comments and shares, so if shares are important to you to get more organic traffic, ask for shares in your live streams and track how many shares you get.

Funnel Insights

If you look at Funnel Insights, this is Facebook attempting to be helpful with 3-second and 10-second views and give you a little more understanding of how engaged your audience is. Basically, Facebook is taking the 3-second views, comparing that down to the 1-minute video views, and then looking at the engaged people. This is the number of people who commented, shared, or reacted to your live video. So if you’re looking for percentages, this is where you’ll find that data.

#3: Key Facebook Live Metrics to Watch

While all of these Facebook video insights will help you understand more about how your live video is performing, don’t make all of your decisions based on these insights in isolation. Instead, look at your data points as they relate to each other.

Analytics can be a powerful tool if interpreted correctly but they can be equally destructive if you aren’t looking at the right metrics.

For starters, don’t pay attention to the 3-second or 10-second views. Seeing that 80% of people watched for 3 seconds is not only depressing but also misleading.

A lot of factors with Facebook Live video are different from recorded video. Viewers frequently come and go during a live broadcast. Maybe they get a phone call while watching on their mobile device so it interrupts the stream. When they come back, that’s counted as a new session. While they may have been there for 3 seconds the first time, got a call, came back, and watched for 15 minutes, they’re counted differently so it’s not cumulative.

Also don’t pay attention to minutes watched unless you’re using it to compare your growth over time.

Do, however, pay attention to the ratio of engagement to viewers. If you have 100 simultaneous viewers and only 2 people commenting, that’s not a good ratio. You absolutely want more people commenting and engaging than that. If you can hit a 20% to 30% engagement rate, meaning 20% to 30% of simultaneous viewers are leaving comments, you’re doing well. If you get anything higher than that, you can consider your streams to be highly engaging.

Also pay attention to unique viewers. That’ll give you a better understanding of how many people you’re actually reaching with your Facebook Live video.

Conclusion

Let me leave you with two guiding principles to remember when analyzing your Facebook Live video insights.

First, at the end of the day, your goal with live video should be to create loyal fans for your brand. So it’s better to have 50 viewers watching with a 75% engagement rate than 100 viewers watching with a 10% engagement rate. Facebook won’t show you this data so you’ll have to use your brain on this one. However, I’m a firm believer that this metric matters more to your growth than any of the insights Facebook will give you.

Second, look at where you start, not somebody else, and work to constantly improve your metrics. You’ll see faster results this way with live video and get more creative in the process.

The post HOW TO ANALYSE FACEBOOK LIVE VIDEO: A MARKETING TUTORIAL appeared first on Sirena Media.

#1: Focus on One Goal in Your Instagram Video Ad

Advertisers often think that to generate maximum ROI from their ads, they need to set and accomplish several goals. However, this only leads to a low conversion rate because too many goals will trigger a paradox of choice. With too many choices, viewers won’t know what they’re supposed to do next, and they’ll end up not taking any action.

To get the best results from your Instagram video ads, focus on only one goal at a time. The goal you set will depend on your overall business goal. If you want to generate sales, focus on driving more traffic to a conversion-optimized landing page. If you want to improve your brand image, create a video that positively reflects your business, and work on driving as many views as possible.

You want to get people to take action toward one goal.

For instance, if you run an eCommerce store and are serving ads to increase sales, you should make your video ads shoppable. Instagram lets you add a call to action (CTA) to your ads that goes to a landing page, but you can only add a link to one page. This is why if you’re promoting multiple products in your ads, you need to create a special page just for the ad and place links to all of the products on that page. Fortunately, there’s an easier way to do this: Instagram shoppable posts.

A shoppable post lets you link to multiple products in your Instagram ads. That way, people only need to click on the products they’re interested in to visit their landing pages. This will also save you time because you won’t need to create a special listing page every time you set up an ad.

One company that has had success with shoppable video posts is Natori. The lingerie and clothing brand shares video posts like the one below and tags the products showcased in the video. When people see the video, the shopping bag icon (in the lower-left corner) signals that there are product tags.

When viewers tap on the shopping bag icon, they’ll be able to see all of the products tagged in the video.

To set up shoppable posts for videos, you need to use a good eCommerce builder that has the shoppable posts integration with Instagram.

#2: Optimize Your Instagram Video Ad for Feed Consumption

Instagram video ads can be up to 120 seconds long but you don’t have to create long ads just because Instagram lets you. In fact, shorter videos might provide better results. According to HubSpot research, videos that are 26 seconds long drive the most engagement on Instagram.

So make your videos as succinct as possible. Instead of dilly-dallying and stretching your videos to the full 120 seconds, get to the main point quickly and introduce your CTA early on.

A good short video ad I came across recently was this one from Smart Mike+. The video is brief but contains all of the necessary information. Plus, when you provide less information in your ad, it will generate more curiosity and people will need to visit the landing page to learn more.

Share Your Best Information in the First Few Seconds

To create any successful Instagram video ad, you need to follow the AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action) model. Usually, the thumbnail does the job of attracting attention but Instagram users who have autoplay turned on probably won’t see it. This is why you should also execute the attention part of the video in the first few seconds to hook users (who have autoplay turned on).

Think about what pain point is at the top of your target audience’s mind and talk about it in the first few seconds of your video. You can then generate interest and desire by talking about the solution and your product. Again, keep this part very short to ensure viewers keep watching.

For a good idea on how to generate attention right away, check out this ad from SEMRush. Right from the start, they let viewers know how much their articles cost and they have a big ‘”Order Your Article” CTA. This direct, short video not only attracts attention but also prompts viewers to take action.

Use Simple Wording for the Script and Overlay Text

The average Instagram user follows several accounts and is probably also active on other social networks such as Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and others. They go to these sites to look at posts from people they follow. They aren’t there to see your ad. That’s why it’s important to create ads that will hold their attention for as long as possible. A simple mistake takes their focus elsewhere.

One way to hold viewers’ attention is to keep it simple. This includes what you say in your video and what you write in your overlay text and caption. The second you start using words people don’t understand just to make yourself look sophisticated, you’ll lose their attention and they’ll get distracted by something else.

To illustrate, this video ad from AppSumo keeps everything simple to hold people’s attention and get them to stick around for the CTA.

Not only do they use simple wording in the video, but they also use it in the caption. As you can see, the sentences are short with easy-to-understand text.

I recommend using a tool like Hemingway to help you simplify your writing. Just copy and paste your text into the free online tool and it will simplify it to 4th- or 5th-grade level.

Make Your Ad Seem Less “Ad-Like”

People don’t like being sold to. Not all of the people who check out your video ad will want to stick around to the end. Many viewers will quit watching midway if they realize you’re selling them something. This is why you should try your best to avoid sounding salesy in your ads.

Try sharing tips in your video or making it educational. These types of video ads probably won’t drive sales but they’ll help boost your brand impressions and attract an audience. You can also ask people to follow your account to see more videos like the one they’re viewing.

If you strike the right balance, you can provide value and promote your products at the same time. To visualize this, you could create a tutorial video and show people how to solve a problem using your product. This way, you’ll be indirectly selling your product while also helping viewers.

A good example of a less salesy ad is this one from Byondtravel, a discovery and booking platform. The ad is all about informing viewers about the community Byondtravel provides. The Subscribe button takes viewers to Byondtravel’s account, where viewers can follow them. These types of ads will help the business attract followers who they can sell to later.

#3: Optimize Your Instagram Video Ad for a Mobile-First User

Instagram is chiefly a mobile app. While you can access Instagram on desktop, you can’t do several things that you can do on the app, including posting. This is why most people access the network via a mobile device.

So for your ads, you should optimize your videos and landing page for mobile devices. To ensure your video is mobile-optimized, publish it on a test page organically to see if the video and overlay text are easy to see. When you’re satisfied with the way the video appears, you can publish it as an ad.

If you’re running an eCommerce store, optimizing the page for mobile should be easy because most builders provide this feature.

A good example of a mobile-optimized ad and landing page is this one from Elegant Themes. The video is easy to see on a small screen and the subtitles are large enough to read.

The landing page the ad leads to is optimized for mobile as well.

#4: Test Several Versions of Your Instagram Video Ad

No matter how hard you try, you won’t create the best version of your ad in your first attempt. It takes time to perfect the ad and create a version that will drive the most views, traffic, and sales.

This is why you should test your Instagram video ad before you go live. Your goal at the beginning should be to break even. Instead of investing a huge budget immediately, start with a small budget of $5–$10 per day and gradually scale it as the conversion rate improves.

Split test several versions of the ad at the low budget. You can test things like the video length, dimensions, overlay colors, overlay font, CTAs, landing pages, and so on.

Once you have a winner, pause the other ads and scale up the one that works best. You might also want to create new versions of the winner and split test them further.

Another benefit is that as you test your ad, it will gather views and comments. This will add social proof to your ad and make it more persuasive.

#5: Engage With People Who Comment on Your Instagram Video Ad

When people comment on your Instagram video ad, make sure you respond to every one of them. This will help you answer any questions your audience has. It will also show commenters and ad viewers that you care so more people will be interested in buying your products.

Also, when you respond, you’re increasing the number of comments. And when people view the number of comments, they’ll be curious to learn more about where the ad leads.

The aforementioned SmartMike+ responds to comments in their ads. This helps them build a better relationship with their audience and rack up comments at the same time. So far, the video ad shown earlier has 338 comments.

Conclusion

Instagram ads with just images or a carousel of images work fine—a lot of businesses have had success with them. But what about video? Is it worth the time and effort to create?

There’s no harm in trying. It shouldn’t take much time to create a video, as there are many tools that simplify the process. You can split test a few Instagram video ads along with your photo ads to see which ones get the best results. If video ads generate a better ROI, the time you put into creating them will pay off in the long run.

The post HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR INSTAGRAM VIDEO ADS: 5 TIPS appeared first on Sirena Media.

Wondering how to use video to build stronger connections with your customers and prospects? Looking for a process to follow for your next video?

To explore how to create emotional connections with video, I interview Matt Johnston on the Social Media Marketing Podcast.

Matt is a former journalist turned video marketing expert and founder of Guide Social, a video marketing agency that helps businesses get mass attention. He hosts The Video Marketing Podcast and is author of the book, Producing Empathy.

Matt shares his HERO process for creating empathy-driven video and explains how any business can use storytelling to create marketing videos people will share.

Listen to the Podcast Now

This article is sourced from the Social Media Marketing Podcast, a top marketing podcast. Listen or subscribe below.

https://html5-player.libsyn.com/embed/episode/id/13725857/height/90/theme/custom/thumbnail/yes/preload/no/direction/backward/render-playlist/no/custom-color/3a89a9/

Building Strong Connections With Video

A natural storyteller, Matt spent most of his 20s as a theater director in New York City before earning a graduate degree in journalism at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications. Matt then spent a few years producing TV news before becoming a digital video producer at Business Insider. He later built New York Magazine‘s digital video program from the ground up, which incorporated their other brands including Vulture and The Cut.

Next, Matt went on to build three new lifestyle channels for NowThis, the top global video news publisher on Facebook. After racking up billions of video views for NowThis Sports, NowThis Money, and NowThis Food, he left to start his own firm, Guide Social.

Guide Social is a video marketing company that creates both emotionally driven testimonial content and big, branded content campaigns for companies and personal brands. Guide Social’s videos are built around empathy-driven storytelling because empathy is what makes content go viral.

Matt aims to bring the human connection back to the world of social media marketing. At the beginning, there was a gold rush in digital marketing, with everybody flocking to the next funnel, and the personal nature of social media got lost somewhere. Matt feels like video is the conduit to bring those connections back because video is such an incredibly personal way to build a relationship with an audience.

If you’re a personal brand, video gives you the experience of really putting yourself in front of someone, face to face, literally just a few feet away. That’s a powerful connector. Great social media video is also about giving value to people in the way they want to consume it, and truly caring about what they want, need, and can use. It’s just like human-to-human relationships. Video feels more personal than other types of content.

You can build a deeper relationship with somebody using video than you often can with a blog or with any other platform online. This makes video the perfect medium to bring that empathy back and show that we’re all humans and can identify with each other’s emotions if we’re brave enough to really put ourselves out there.

It’s why Matt’s book is called Producing Empathy: People share and engage with content based on emotional identification or empathy. Being vulnerable, transparent, and valuable is the entire game. If you can force yourself to somehow break down your own walls, you’ll become known, loved, and trusted. This is where we’re trying to go, especially in social media marketing. That’s where video comes in. Being you is more powerful than being famous.

There’s a strong feeling of identification that comes with being able to see other people. Even on a podcast, you feel close to the person speaking because the experience replicates what it might be like sitting next to each other. You can get something that feels much more identifiable on video. Even in a selfie video, it feels like the person is speaking directly to you.

There’s something about looking into people’s eyes. We see ourselves in there. The eyes are a window into the soul. The audience gets just a little bit entranced and that can be a very powerful experience.

There’s also all of the nonverbal communication that happens when you look at someone’s face. The expressions of their mouth, the wrinkles on their forehead, and the way that they look away or look up and think—all of that adds a layer to the verbal communication. Those expressions convey something even in the absence of words. That’s a strong form of meta-communication, which is super-powerful.

There’s something deep that happens when you get a chance to see someone’s face. You get to see that they’re not acting; they’re being authentic and true.

The HERO System

Matt calls his system for creating social media video “HERO,” which is an acronym for hook, empathy, response, and over-deliver. It’s squarely focused on emotional identification, value, and empathy. It’s all about communicating the message, “I actually care about you; here’s the value I have to impart to you. Do you see yourself in me? If so, let’s go on this journey together.”

All of the big video programs Matt built for his previous employers were social media videos, geared toward algorithmic-based news feed platforms—which describes pretty much every social platform except potentially YouTube. The main way other social platforms differ from YouTube is in how you find video content.

On YouTube, you’re coming from a thumbnail; you’re coming from one place to another to get a video. Very often it’s based on search intent. With the algorithms, you’re just shown things. A video comes up and it’s a matter of, “Hey, here’s a gift. Are you interested or not?” You have a very limited window.

There’s also a difference in intent. When you go to Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn, you don’t necessarily have the explicit intent to watch video. You’re going there to get updated on your friends and your connections, and you may or may not choose to watch a video. With YouTube, you go there with the explicit intent to watch a video, and you’ll probably stick around longer on YouTube because that’s why you’re there.

On the algorithmic platforms, since we marketers are “disrupting” the user experience, we’ve got to create something that causes some sort of an emotional reaction to provide value.

The main currency Matt shoots for with social media video is the share because that’s what leads to virality. People will share content that they emotionally identify with because they want other people to emotionally identify with it too. People share content well before they watch even half of the video.

You have to optimize for the share, for the response, because that’s how you go viral. If that happens, it sends a signal that you’re creating something that people find valuable and connect with. On any of those algorithmic-based news feed platforms, we don’t go to the content—the content comes to us. We have to change the way we structure our videos to optimize for it.

H: Hook

Hook is the emotional reaction at the very beginning, the first 3 or 4 seconds of a video.

We have two sides to our brains. One side of our brain makes cognitive decisions for us such as whether we should have a ham sandwich or a turkey sandwich. We’re not talking to that side of the brain with our videos; there’s not enough time for that.

We’re trying to stop thumbs so we need to speak to the part of people’s brains that is much more connected to their bodies, to their emotions. We need to reach the nerve connections where if you touch a hot stove, you scream and run the other direction. That’s the brain that we’re looking for and we want to nail it from the beginning.

There are two ways to do that with the hook. The first way is if you have amazing footage; the best stuff gets front-loaded. Don’t wait. This is different on YouTube, because there, you need to do teases to get people more engaged in the content and send those signals to YouTube that people are watching a lot of your video.

It’s different on the algorithmic social media platforms. If you look at Facebook and Instagram engagement graphs, you’re going to see the drop-off rates plummet after 10 seconds. That’s fine because you’re reaching many more people, and you’re disrupting their experience—but if you’re putting your best stuff 30 seconds into your video, nobody’s going to see it. You have to stop them there at the very beginning.

You can put it in again later if you want because you’re telling a story the whole time. So if you can, hook them from the start with the best footage you have because that’s where the money is.

If you don’t have any great video footage, use a really good headline that’s specific and strikes an emotional chord. Think about BuzzFeed headlines; for example, “The Simple Reason Every Woman Is Curling Her Hair Wrong.” It’s so specific that every woman who curls her hair is going to empathize with that and so she’s in.

Even if I don’t have amazing footage that’s going to blow people away, I’m able to get them into the video through emotional connection instead of footage.

This text-on-screen format meets people where they are because they’re sitting on their phones, they’re often not able to listen, and you have a very short window. There’s no way that you can rely on a situation in which you’ve got no idea how they’re experiencing your content. If you just fly the text on-screen and you hit them over the head with it, then you can catch their attention. Hopefully, it’s a good-enough headline or video footage that it really cuts to their heart and makes them want to stop.

Videos almost always autoplay in people’s feeds. If you don’t stop their thumbs from the start, you’ve lost your chance to get someone into your video content. This is why the worst thing you could possibly do is start your videos with a logo. There’s nothing more important than the first 3–5 seconds because it doesn’t matter how good your video is after that. If nobody watches it, what impact does it have?

It’s the same thing as putting a boring headline on a great blog. It could be the best-written piece of content in the world, but if you can’t get people into it, you’re going to have a fundamental issue with your content creation and distribution.

E: Empathy

Emotional identification is the reason anybody clicks anything online. It blows them away or it’s going to give them value. It has the promise of connection or the promise of a relationship. We want to see ourselves, we want a mirror—that’s what we all subconsciously want when we’re looking for content online to engage with. This is a great way to think about value, because with content, you need to be squarely focused on giving value.

The best way to give value is by understanding how your audience feels and showing empathy. It’s an automatic two-way street. Empathy is an incredible process to go through with somebody and a great relationship-building piece if you can show empathy with content.

Empathy is also the best way to come up with a content strategy. What kind of content should you make? Well, what kind of things resonate with the lifestyles and lives of the people that you’re serving? What do they care about? What do they cry about? What do they laugh about?

Make sure that you’re choosing stories that will spur empathy and telling them in a way that continues to show that you emotionally identify with audience members and that they can emotionally identify with you. You’re letting them in and they’re letting you in. Then you’ll really get the opportunity to build an awesome connection with them, which can go so far from a business standpoint.

It’s not about your product and service, it’s about the people you serve. It’s not about you, it’s about them. When Matt is trying to help brands come up with the type of content to use, he takes them through what he calls a persona exercise. They come up with their ideal avatar, the ideal target customer. Then they think about that avatar’s entire lifestyle.

Many times, we see the audience only through our own very limited lens. We’re only looking at them through the lens of what we want, as if we were the only thing in their lives and the problem we solve is the only thing going on with them. Instead, we need to look at the entire lifestyle that they’re living.

Matt teaches a process called a lifestyle map. After doing the persona exercise, you make a lifestyle map where you put the avatar in the center and draw little bicycle spokes out. Each spoke is a different piece of that person’s lifestyle.

Let’s say we’re selling wedding dresses. We have our avatar, Sylvia, in the middle, and she’s getting married. The different bicycle spokes would be the different parts of Sylvia’s life. Is Sylvia’s life all about getting married? No. There’s a lot going on in Sylvia’s life and that’s what surrounds our avatar.

Depending on your product or service, your avatar could be a high-income individual who is extremely busy so we know that there are a lot of people in that avatar set who are lawyers and doctors. “Extremely busy” would be one core lifestyle trait.

Then we’d go down again and say, “Well, most of the people in this avatar set are moms.” So we would have “mother” as another spoke for Sylvia. Over here, we say that this avatar is mostly 30- to 35-year-old women. We can go around all of the things that matter to Sylvia, what she cares about in her life.

And then, as someone who sells wedding gowns, we can make content about motherhood, we can make content about busy lifestyles and issues with morning routines, and all of the things that make Sylvia say, “Oh yes, that’s me. Yes, I do have a problem with that.” It builds a relationship.

It’s got nothing to do with wedding gowns. That’s the part that a lot of marketers are going to struggle to grasp. It’s got everything to do with the challenges faced by the audience they’re trying to attract, and whether those videos resonate with that audience.

The key is creating a deeper relationship with that human being. Often, as marketers, we’re not playing an AOV, or average order value, game, which is, “I want you to buy something now and then go away.” We’re playing an LTV, a lifetime value, game. We want to create superfans. And you don’t create a super-fan by saying, “Hey, buy my wedding gown.”

Social media is becoming more personal and it’s going into private channels more often. It’s more important than ever to deepen those individual relationships.

R: Response

Response is where the share happens. If you’re just creating content for people to consume, it’s going to be one-way and it’s probably not going to go viral. It could provide value but it’s not quite structured correctly. When you’re trying to get someone to emotionally respond to your content, this is where we structure stories in completely different ways.

The basic idea is to continue to front-load different parts of the story to create those cold opens so we can get the share in before we even get to the story.

Very often, when you’re structuring a social video script, you may get to a point where you want to just deliver context. You get people in, and you offer that hook and the promise of your headline—but if you continue just setting the stage with your next line, that’s not shareable content. The important thing is to locate the biggest empathy moments in your script, the biggest mirror moments that will really make people share those things.

Don’t do the most common thing right off the bat. Find the wackiest, craziest piece and put it right up front because you’re optimizing it for response. The response is done by the watcher but it’s cued by the way you compose the video. By front-loading your video after the hook with really valuable, interesting, or emotional substance, the hope is that your audience will hit Share before they’ve even watched the rest of the video, and then they’ll keep watching it.

It’s normal to tell a profile story in a very linear way: Start at the beginning and go to the end. But if you structure your video that way, when you’re mostly trying to distribute it from social platforms, you’re not optimizing it for shares. You need to think a little bit harder and develop that cold open.

One time Matt went to Switzerland to interview Paralympic athletes for a campaign with Toyota. He interviewed a Mexican mono-skier who started crying because he admitted to Matt that he’d thought about ending his life. His guest had never told anybody, because he had the accident at 14 years old and almost lost everything, including the will to live. Matt said to himself in that moment, “This needs to be in the beginning of the video. I need to make sure that people see this and experience this. Because this is the truth. This is empathy.”

A lot of people would have built up to that moment and made it the crescendo; but instead, Matt decided to reorganize it so that it was more of a cold open. He used it to get people feeling something for this man and going with him on this journey to move into it.

O: Over-Deliver

There’s nothing new under the sun with content. We’re all usually making the same stories. So you’ve got to exceed people’s expectations of value in that content because that’s what they’re going to remember.

The goal with any piece of content is to get it shared. But when it’s done, when people have consumed it, did they feel like they had at least one useful nugget they could take away from it that they hadn’t heard or experienced before?

How can you over-deliver value to show that you actually care? How do you show that you’re not just cookie-cutting these videos, you’re putting thought into them, you’re putting heart into them, and you care about the people who see them? You want to help them.

You know how you feel when somebody over-delivers for you in real life? They send you a card and you think, “Oh my gosh, I can’t believe this person took the time to send me a card in the physical mail.” You also feel slightly indebted, of course, so there’s a marketing tactic there. But also you feel a connection: “Wow, this person really cares about me.”

It makes you think about yourself and reflect on yourself. In video form, by over-delivering value, you’re showing that this isn’t just a marketing tactic; it’s actually us caring about you and your experience.

These are short videos so you’ve got a lot to do in only 60 seconds. The hook is 3-5 seconds, then the first most shareable piece of information, the second most shareable piece of information, a little bit of context, and then add that extra layer of value to over-deliver again.

There’s that factor, that little way to give perspective to it that nobody else would do. Historical perspective, maybe a quote from someone tracing it back to something, a different application of this knowledge, that little extra… It’s just a couple of lines, but it really makes a difference.

Key Takeaways From This Episode:

• Find out more about Matt and Guide Social on his website.
• Listen to The Video Marketing Podcast.
• Follow Matt on LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube.
• Read Producing Empathy (special deal for SME readers/listeners!).
• Sign up for the Social Media Marketing Society.
• Watch exclusive content and original videos from Social Media Examiner on YouTube.
• Watch our weekly Social Media Marketing Talk Show, live on Fridays at 10 AM Pacific on Crowdcast.

The post CREATING SOCIAL VIDEOS THAT GROW STRONG CONNECTIONS appeared first on Sirena Media.

Who among us does not feel the shadow of fear cast by the cowardly laws of these past years? The Scoundrel Laws terrorize not only those who might commit violence, but anyone who associates with them. They reward those who denounce their brothers and sisters, sowing distrust and ill-will. They freeze our hearts and our tongues, by punishing with prison anyone who provokes, praises, or merely seeks to understand those mad acts to which an insane society has driven a few poor souls.

Perhaps even these words, here, are enough to summon our new inquisitors.

If so, I say, let them come. I know their jail cells; their guards are my comrades and friends. Scoundrel laws, like the scoundrels who created them, must one day lose their power. It is a law of justice and nature.

A few years later, most of this rabble had lost whatever convictions drove their violence. Even deluded demagogues renounced their youthful dreams. We need no further evidence than a pamphlet from the printing offices of confusion.

Who among us does not feel the shadow of fear cast by the cowardly laws of these past years? The Scoundrel Laws terrorize not only those who might commit violence, but anyone who associates with them.

Who among us does not feel the shadow of fear cast by the cowardly laws of these past years? The Scoundrel Laws terrorize not only those who might commit violence, but anyone who associates with them. They reward those who denounce their brothers and sisters, sowing distrust and ill-will. They freeze our hearts and our tongues, by punishing with prison anyone who provokes, praises, or merely seeks to understand those mad acts to which an insane society has driven a few poor souls.

Perhaps even these words, here, are enough to summon our new inquisitors.

Perhaps even these words, here, are enough to summon our new inquisitors.

If so, I say, let them come. I know their jail cells; their guards are my comrades and friends. Scoundrel laws, like the scoundrels who created them, must one day lose their power. It is a law of justice and nature.

Who among us does not feel the shadow of fear cast by the cowardly laws of these past years? The Scoundrel Laws terrorize not only those who might commit violence, but anyone who associates with them. They reward those who denounce their brothers and sisters, sowing distrust and ill-will. They freeze our hearts and our tongues, by punishing with prison anyone who provokes, praises, or merely seeks to understand those mad acts to which an insane society has driven a few poor souls.

Perhaps even these words, here, are enough to summon our new inquisitors.

If so, I say, let them come. I know their jail cells; their guards are my comrades and friends. Scoundrel laws, like the scoundrels who created them, must one day lose their power. It is a law of justice and nature.

The post When Chocolate was Medicine: Colmenero, Wadsworth, and Dufour appeared first on Sirena Media.

Who among us does not feel the shadow of fear cast by the cowardly laws of these past years? The Scoundrel Laws terrorize not only those who might commit violence, but anyone who associates with them. They reward those who denounce their brothers and sisters, sowing distrust and ill-will. They freeze our hearts and our tongues, by punishing with prison anyone who provokes, praises, or merely seeks to understand those mad acts to which an insane society has driven a few poor souls.

Perhaps even these words, here, are enough to summon our new inquisitors.

If so, I say, let them come. I know their jail cells; their guards are my comrades and friends. Scoundrel laws, like the scoundrels who created them, must one day lose their power. It is a law of justice and nature.

A few years later, most of this rabble had lost whatever convictions drove their violence. Even deluded demagogues renounced their youthful dreams. We need no further evidence than a pamphlet from the printing offices of confusion.

Who among us does not feel the shadow of fear cast by the cowardly laws of these past years? The Scoundrel Laws terrorize not only those who might commit violence, but anyone who associates with them.

Who among us does not feel the shadow of fear cast by the cowardly laws of these past years? The Scoundrel Laws terrorize not only those who might commit violence, but anyone who associates with them. They reward those who denounce their brothers and sisters, sowing distrust and ill-will. They freeze our hearts and our tongues, by punishing with prison anyone who provokes, praises, or merely seeks to understand those mad acts to which an insane society has driven a few poor souls.

Perhaps even these words, here, are enough to summon our new inquisitors.

Perhaps even these words, here, are enough to summon our new inquisitors.

If so, I say, let them come. I know their jail cells; their guards are my comrades and friends. Scoundrel laws, like the scoundrels who created them, must one day lose their power. It is a law of justice and nature.

Who among us does not feel the shadow of fear cast by the cowardly laws of these past years? The Scoundrel Laws terrorize not only those who might commit violence, but anyone who associates with them. They reward those who denounce their brothers and sisters, sowing distrust and ill-will. They freeze our hearts and our tongues, by punishing with prison anyone who provokes, praises, or merely seeks to understand those mad acts to which an insane society has driven a few poor souls.

Perhaps even these words, here, are enough to summon our new inquisitors.

If so, I say, let them come. I know their jail cells; their guards are my comrades and friends. Scoundrel laws, like the scoundrels who created them, must one day lose their power. It is a law of justice and nature.

The post The Human Pyramids of Juste De Juste (ca. 1540) appeared first on Sirena Media.