Industrial B2B Video Marketing

Merry Christmas!  While you are enjoying the holiday break, we’ll be hard at work bumping your business down the first page of Google’s search results.  Well, maybe not your business specifically, but more than a few B2B companies will return from the holidays to discover that they no longer hold a top position.  How we do this may surprise you because it doesn’t involve paid advertising.

First, a frame of reference:  Over the last ten years, Google has placed increasing emphasis on “content”.  This is not new.  Content, in this context, is the written word on your website which is useful to the reader–in this case a prospective customer.  This is well understood in the B2C world and among the larger players in the B2B world.  However, most small to mid-size businesses are doing a terrible job on their written content.  They are so far behind that they may never reach the first page of Google search results.  But there is hope, because…

Another form of content is video–and here is where things get interesting.  Even small B2B companies can reach the top of page one with video.  We know, because we’ve been doing it for the last year, displacing larger and better-funded players.  What may be surprising is that we’ve been doing it not only with YouTube, but with other video services like Vimeo.  It seems that for now, Google is giving preference to video not only from their own YouTube service, but from other platforms as well.

If you are a B2B company selling your wares to industrial customers, you probably already have plenty of video content that can be used to help new customers find you, but you need to know what to do with it.

At Six Foot Lever, we’re standing by to assist you.  But if you’ve already burned through your marketing budget for the year, here is a holiday gift for you:

Our 2019 Video SEO Checklist will get you started in maximizing your existing video content.  If you take a little time to follow the steps, you’ll be well on your way to the first page of search engine results, using the video you already paid for.

What could be a better gift for your business than free advertising?

 

 

Six Foot Lever is a Detroit-based marketing firm specializing in industrial B2B customers.

 

 

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2019 Video SEO Checklist

Maximize the videos you already have so they appear at the top of Google search results, with our 2019 B2B video SEO checklist.

Google is showing a preference for video content in the search results and you can make this work in your B2B marketing. It’s no surprise that Google wants to bring people to YouTube, but what is surprising is that they are showing a preference for video…even if it’s on a different platform.

If you aren’t ready to pay a pro to do this for you, don’t worry.  You can go a long way by following the checklist below.  The checklist does not tell you every small detail, but with a little searching, you CAN do this yourself.  Our YouTube checklist is also helpful if you aren’t looking for a Detroit-based marketing and advertising agency but still want to use the know-how of the Six Foot Lever team.

Beginner’s Video Content Checklist:

  • Create a video in HD (a minimum of 720, but 1080 or 4K is better). This video should have narration because YouTube (Google) has the ability to identify spoken keywords in a video (first Pro Tip to maximizing your video’s impact).  Obviously, everyone wants their video to have perfect editing and branding,  but don’t let the perfect be the enemy of progress.  A product video shot with your iPhone is better than nothing.
  • Upload the video to your YouTube channel. Don’t neglect to fill in your channel description.
  • Fill in the video description!  We’re surprised at how many people skip this step or put just one line of info because some “marketing expert” said the description doesn’t matter for SEO.  Although it’s unlikely you will be able to measure an impact in search engine results, YouTube still needs to know what your video is about so it can be associated with other videos.  This is key to someone discovering your company after watching your competitor’s video.  Explain what your product is doing in the video and be sure to use keywords from your industry (words and phrases your CUSTOMER would use to find you).
  • Put a link in the description back to a relevant page on your website. If this product can be purchased on an e-commerce site, make sure to link it as well.  Preferably, these pages have some of the information from the video description, which lets Google know the page is relevant.  Put your contact info as well, so a prospective customer can find you.
  • Fill in the keywords section with terms that YOUR CUSTOMER would use to find your product or service. If you engage in keyword research, remember that in the B2B Industrial world, key terms may not show significant usage.  This is where conventional marketing agencies often fail, using keywords that have more searches, but much lower relevance.
  • Embed the YouTube video on the page your video linked back to.
  • Now repeat these same steps on Vimeo.com (second Pro Tip). The format is different, but all of these steps can also be implemented on Vimeo.  For the time being it appears that Google is being “fair” to Vimeo by showing their videos alongside YouTube results.  This could change in the future, or maybe Google is doing this because they are going to buy Vimeo later.  Who knows.  What I can tell you is that we’ve ranked Vimeo videos above competing YouTube videos.  We’ve even ranked a Vimeo video right next to an identical YouTube video, pushing the other video competitors to the right, in the slider (off the page).
  • This last step is the hardest to do but can have a significant impact on the search performance of your video: create and upload a closed caption script.  Although YouTube will auto-generate captions, many technical terms will not translate correctly.  There are services that will do this for you, but we find that an easier way is to just correct the auto-generated text through your channel dashboard.

 

Bonus Pro Tip

If you’ve read this far, you should be rewarded, so we will outline a strategy that no one (if anyone) is using.  When you link to a YouTube video from your webpage, you may have noticed that other videos play at the end of the video.  Often times these are competitor’s videos.  We see this all the time when people use a YouTube link on LinkedIn (if your marketing team has done this….PLEASE let us show them how to handle video promotions on LinkedIn).  You need to use the embed code for the video, rather than a simple link and then change your end of video settings so they do not autoplay.  But there is another way.

Instead of putting your YouTube video front and center, put it at the very end of the page with a sentence above it that says, “Here’s the same video if you prefer to watch on YouTube”. *

Now go back and embed the Vimeo version of your video on the web page, where appropriate.  On the Vimeo platform, you can control what video plays next (set this in the video settings).  So your customer will see other video content from you after the first video, even if they follow the link to Vimeo.  Vimeo also allows you to embed an email sign up form, or buttons to bring them to your store, front page, contact info, etc.

Chances are, your customer will not watch the video on YouTube, because they’ve already watched it on the Vimeo link.  However, by putting it at the bottom, your page will still enjoy the benefit of being cross-linked to a Google platform.  You should also consider that many IT departments block YouTube from their employees (last Pro tip) but Vimeo is often left off the blacklist.

In summary, the Vimeo video is the content for your customer, but the YouTube video also brings in outside viewers and helps with SEO.

Hopefully, this tip list gets you started in the process of ranking your videos at the top of search results.  Remember, you don’t have to be in the Detroit area, or even in Michigan, to hire the Six Foot Lever digital marketing team.  Email us at info@sixfootlever.com to see if we are a good fit for each other.

*Make sure to turn off the YouTube suggested video feature (as shown in this post), which will force the player to suggest your other videos at the end.  However, this only works if the viewer does not follow the link to the YouTube site.

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Six Foot Lever Now Offers Technical Content Writing

We now offer technical writing for engineering and metrology clients.

In the course of helping our clients, we’ve encountered a common theme; They just don’t have the time to contribute regularly to their blogs.  Many of the companies we assist are technically oriented, offering very niche manufacturing products or engineering services.  There is often a disconnect between the personnel that run the blog and those that understand the technical aspects of the product or service.  A Marketing department can only write so much…before it sounds like “marketing”.  Your customers want to read technical information, if you want them to stay engaged.  Since our staff consists of engineers from various disciplines, we’ve started to assist our customers in the writing of technical content.  This entails an interview process with the client’s engineering and web resources.  From this, a topic list is produced and then we set to work researching each article and writing useful content that your customers will actually read.  Each article is reviewed by the client before publishing.

It’s not difficult to find someone to write content if you are selling sunglasses.  However, if you are offering niche products in manufacturing or engineering services, you need writers with that background.  For a sample of our writing content, please see this public article on camshaft gauges, published by one of our technical content contributors.

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Protect Your Online Reputation, for Free!

Protecting the online reputation of your Detroit Small Business does not need to be difficult or expensive.

Here is one way to get started for no cost.

Do you know what your customers and competitors are saying about you online?

As business owners, we are concerned when a customer or client has a bad experience with our brand. If the customer lets us know, we do our best to correct it and turn them into a loyal supporter. But often, the customer goes away disappointed or worse, they write about their bad experience online. Bad press can be extremely difficult to deal with if you know about it. It’s even harder to deal with if you don’t know about it. So, knowing what people are saying and where is the fist step to protecting your reputation. Fortunately, getting started is easy with this one suggestion.

Mention.com is an online service that monitors online media for any mentions of your product or business. A starter account is free and will let you set up a few basic searches and see what people are saying. Of course, there are a number of online reputation management companies and that may be a more practical solution, as your business grows. But here at SixFootLever.com we are about teaching small to mid-sized businesses how they can get measurable improvements, using technology tools and their own employees.

You can also use Mention’s services to reply to online mentions, through your social accounts. After you’ve got the basics down, try putting in your competitor’s information and see what others are saying about them. If you see a question about their product that is going unanswered, jump in and try to answer. It’s a great way to show off your superior customer service! Be polite and never speak ill of your competitors, just do a better job of answering their customer’s questions.

So give Mention.com a try and see if you don’t learn something about how your customers perceive your product or business. We have no affiliation with Mention.com, we just think that they have a great service that can be learned in about 10 min. It’s one of the first tools we show our clients, at SixFootLever!

Note: you may discover that some of your “mentions” are random clips of text, from your own web page. You can ignore those, as they are likely due to first generation internet marketers “spinning articles” or creating link farms. If the postings mention you but do not appear to make any sense, don’t worry about it. At least for now. Maybe we’ll talk about that in an upcoming post.

 

Check out our LinkedIn post about using Mention.com to protect your online reputation.  You can learn it in 10 min and it’s FREE to get started!

This article originally appeared on Darren Dawes’ LinkedIn page:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/1-thing-you-can-do-right-now-protect-your-online-reputation-dawes

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3 Easy Ways to Leverage Technology Tools, to Bulletproof Your Business

Learning how Internet Technology Tools can help your Detroit Business is easy.

 Here are 3 to get started:

Some of my friends with small businesses have asked what I’ve been working on with SixFootLever consulting. SixFootLever is a training company that seeks to teach established, mid-sized businesses, new technology tools and services that are available to improve efficiency and protect their market niche. Some examples include small scale outsourcing, manufacturing abroad, automatic order fulfillment, online visibility, customer engagement methods, and recurring revenue systems. These technology tools and services have now advanced to the point where it is easy to teach your employees the needed skills by integrating them with their current responsibilities. In many cases, you will no longer need to hire out these services, because SixFootLever teaches the man (or woman) to fish. You still CAN hire out when required, but now you will do it abroad, in order to reduce the costs. You can easily contract out the tasks you need accomplished, rather than hiring a permanent employee or consultant.

So for my friends and followers, here is an example of what we teach. This article describes, in general, 3 steps a traditional small business can take to exploit the solo entrepreneur’s technology leveraging tools and improve efficiency. The idea is to use the same tricks that today’s new solo entrepreneur uses, so that you can streamline your own business. When used by a small to medium sized business, these tricks act as force multipliers (hence the use of “lever” in our name) to improve efficiency, reduce the cash outlay for services, and reduce the number of employee hours needed to complete tasks:

Today’s solo entrepreneurs (aka solopreneurs) and start-ups use a number of technology tools and services to help them start and run a business, with a minimum of resources. Some of these tools previously existed in a more complicated form and others were recently developed, to meet the solopreneur’s limited time resources. They allow the solopreneur to accomplish feats that would have required teams of people to emulate, as little as ten years ago. In most cases, the tools are scalable, as the business grows. For the first time ever, if is now possible for a single person using technology tools to:

  • Raise Capital
  • Design a Product
  • Manufacture at Home or Abroad
  • Market to the Customer
  • Ship from a Fulfilment Center
  • Keep the Books
  • Create Recurring Revenue Models
  • and more

The tools available allow a single person or small team to start a new business, or more importantly for this discussion, to be able to compete with a larger business.

Note that even using these tools, it would be very difficult for the individual to compete with a large company like HP or Intel where there are teams of people assigned to each of the above tasks. Additionally, many of these companies are aware of the tools of the solopreneur and are working to bring them into their business model. The smarter large companies and the solopreneur have a handle on this shift in the way business is being done. But what about the established mid-sized companies? For this discussion, we’ll call them the small businesses with 25 to 300 employees. The ones that do a good job of running their operations, using conventional “departments”, job descriptions, and structures. These companies face a growing threat (see my darker article, “the Threat” on Medium.com) from the start up that decides to target their business and will have an even harder time than usual, competing against larger companies. They have not learned the technology tools of the solopreneur and lack the advantages that a larger business achieves from scale. For these companies, the past approach has been to hire out the specialized knowledge required to leverage these tech tools. But can you really trust your core business to hired guns?

There is already a trend of solopreneurs who provide marketing services, turning on their previous clients and manufacturing the very items they were helping to market. The last case I heard was of an Internet marketer that decided to offer his own line of lotions and scrubs because he figured that if the client had enough margin to hire him, it was a good business. Without having to pay someone to market his own products, the margins were even bigger. The design and manufacture of the product was the easy part!

It is no longer necessary to hire out these services and trust that “expert” in, for one example, web design. It may have been necessary 15 years ago when all websites were .html and you needed a coder to set up a system that fit YOUR business. However, the tools have continuously improved, in no small part because of the number of software engineers (coders) in business for themselves. They have found the needs and filled them, putting the tools within the understanding of the average person.

So what can the small to mid-sized, established business do to compete? Teach your people to fish! Since these tools are accessible to the average person, you no longer need to hire these tasks out. Put your own people back in charge of the functions you’ve outsourced and teach them new skills! In the near future, these will be basic skills required of every employee. By teaching your people now, you are not only protecting your own business, but offering value to your employees. They will get to learn marketable skills which will reinvigorate their interest in their current job.

There are a myriad of new tools available, but we’ll just pick three examples where you can pick up significant gains, with the least effort. All of the following can be set up and run by a single person, but in your case, you may choose to distribute them among your current employees. For this discussion, we’ll limit the discussion to the following topics:

  1. Marketing
  2. Order Fulfillment
  3. Training and Recurring Revenue models

There are of course many more, but we can get the point across with these three, for the sake of brevity. After all, this is just an introduction and there are hundreds of tools available.

  1. One area where the solopreneur must absolutely succeed, without exception, is in Marketing. The challenge for a lone voice to get heard in a world of billions is substantial. For the last few years, assuming the business was savvy enough to have a webpage, the model has been to pay for “clicks” with the concept being that anyone that searches your business keywords will find your webpage. This method still works, but can cost a significant amount of money (especially if you make no effort to measure conversions and determine the cost of each customer) and ignores the free organic traffic that you can generate from writing content. Every business should have a web page to guide your customer to the next step in the buying process and to inform them about the product or service. We’ll assume that you’ve gone at least that far. So, how do we get customers to our web page without pay per click campaigns? There are 50 or more approaches, but let’s look at the one you can already do, Content Creation. Content Creation means writing or providing…..wait for it….content. This can be in the form of a short, written blog post on your website, a dedicated page on your site that teaches the consumer about your industry, or a how-to video. Although it may mention your product, this is not an advertisement. Rather, it is something that your customer can make use of to benefit THEM. This serves two purposes. First, it gives useful information to your potential customers and establishes YOU as the industry expert. Second, by targeting specific phrases in your writing, search engines will find you when someone searches your phrase. That’s an over simplification, but this is an introductory article. No one knows more about your business than you. So, start writing. Get your employees to write. Filter their thoughts as little as possible, then send it off to a proofreader (free tip, find one starting at $5 on Fiverr.com). Content is a way to engage your customer in open conversation and provide information for everyone to share. Allow questions and answers. You can approve, or “moderate” what ends up on your site. The goal here is to talk about your business and share insights. You want to share valuable information that will directly benefit your customer….for free. Yep, that’s right, FREE! Give so much to your potential customers that they will feel obligated to buy from you when the time comes. (For an in-depth look at this, read Gary Vaynerchuk’s “the Thank You Economy” or his other works). Even if someone else is in a similar business, no one is YOU. You and your people have unique insights and experiences that can benefit your customers. If you haven’t already, have your webpage set up in WordPress, to make it easier for your own people to maintain it and add content. When writing content, you will use key words (“keywords”) that point to the goal or subject of the content. Used in a proper, natural way, these focus words will tell the search engines what the post or page is about.
  2. Order fulfillment and shipping. Does your business have a hard product, do they sell spares, or do they ship software? How do you fill orders? If you are a traditional mid-sized company, you have a means of receiving a PO or payment information, processing the payment, and then a packing and shipping department to send it out. (If your business is primarily a “teaching” company (training, etc.) see number 3, below.) The process usually involves checking inventory and ship times and a certain amount of internal communication. Instead, why not let your customer check the inventory and place his order accordingly. This process can be automated by using an online store service (see Shopify) or fulfillment center, like Amazon. The cost borders on insignificant, with plans starting at $10 a month. For far less than you pay to have an employee do this, they will check inventory, process payment, warehouse, and ship your product. Do you sell something where this is impractical, for example, large machinery? I’ll bet you can automate at least PART of the business (like spare parts and consumables). Even if you cannot process EVERY order through an automated system, even automating part of the process will free up your people to do a better job elsewhere. Did you know that Amazon has an industrial supply site? If not, what else are you missing?
  3. Training. Does your product require in-person training, or does it have an owner’s/user manual? That probably meets the basic need, but maybe you and your people know little “tricks” about the product, that you can show your customer. Why not shoot a video and post it on YouTube or another service? This fills a number of needs. It can help a search engine find you (don’t forget to link to your site), make your product more desirable, provide a resource for you customer, train new employees, and/or be scaled into a recurring revenue model. Depending on your product or business, there may be demand for more “advanced” training than the manual can provide. How about creating step-by-step training videos. For the solopreneur, this is often the ONLY means they have of training since they are a one person operation. Other businesses are built around training videos for another company’s products because, the great thing about a video is that once you create it, it can be sold over and over again. You are selling the SAME product to multiple customers. Why not do a set of short training videos and see if there is an interest. What’s the cost? Well, here we leverage a couple of technologies. First, we’ll use a product like Camtasia to edit a video shot with an iPhone, or to capture your computer screen (if your product involves software). Cost, about $350 and a couple hours of time. This type of software has reached a point where it is intuitive to use. You can get a video that is 80% of what a professional studio can produce, using your own people, for a fraction of their price… Plus, as you might have guessed, they have video training available, if you get stuck. Next, go to Fiverr and have a voiceover added, based on the subtitles that you put into the video. Cost, $5-$15. Post it on your site and on YouTube. If response is favorable, consider adding more videos and selling them to your customers for a small fee or subscription charge.

So there are three easy action items for you that can help your company begin to leverage technology. There is enough information here for you to take action, or, you can check out SixFootLever.com to see the one-time fees to train your employees. Either way, it will go a lot smoother if you can start to locate your own entrepreneurs in the company (aka intrapreneurs), to champion and set up each one of these tools. It has always been the case that in a mid-sized company, that there are those who “moonlight” in another job.  Today, moonlighting often means pursuing a hobby or interest and turning it into an online business. Since these people are the solopreneurs we’ve been discussing (albeit with varying levels of success), it makes sense to search them out, from within your own organization. There are easy ways to find them, but that is the topic of another article.

This article originally appeared on LinkedIn as:

3 Easy Ways to Leverage Technology Tools, to Bulletproof your Established Business

This article explains how to use three easy tools to protect your Detroit based business!

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Training for Your Employees

Six Foot Lever teaches the employees you already have, how to use the modern tools of business as a force multiplier for your workforce, no matter how large or small.

Most established businesses are so busy with day-to-day operations, they do not have time to take advantage of the new online tools that can boost your efficiency, overnight. Our goal is to identify and train your own employees to provide these functions, rather than pay endless consulting or maintenance fees. Some of the skills we teach are:

  • Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Techniques
  • Online Outsourcing  (design, accounting, I.T., etc.)
  • LinkedIn for business
  • Content Creation
  • Automatic Warehousing and Order Fulfillment
  • Online Advertising (but you probably won’t need it!)
  • Long Form Email Marketing
  • Website Construction and Maintenance
  • Technical Content Creation
  • Mail List Development for Promotions
  • Social Media
  • Video Editing and Training Program Development
  • Recurring Revenue Models

By teaching these tools and techniques to your employees, you will attract more customers, enhance revenue, and reduce operational expenses.  Find out how much it costs to give your people these tools, by clicking on “Give Me An Example” at the top of the page.  Don’t pay for a service when you can learn a skill!

We can also assist you in generating technical content for your company’s news feed or blog.  Our engineers can interpret your products or services and help you generate interesting articles on a more frequent basis than you can do on your own.

Email us at info@sixfootlever.com to learn more!

Six Foot Lever LLC, Detroit, MI

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Welcome to Six Foot Lever, LLC

Six Foot Lever LLC is a Detroit based Marketing Assistance firm which assists technology companies in their content marketing.

You may have little or no experience in online marketing, reputation protection, social media, SEO, etc.  We can train your own employees to get maximum gains without a large investment.  When you’ve grown bigger, we’ll also help you find a full-time marketing firm.  But for now, there is a lot that your own employees can accomplish, with a little training.

We want to warn as many small businesses as possible, about the imminent danger to their livelihoods. In the coming months, we’ll be posting articles and free information some of the popular social sharing sites, using this site as the hub.  We’ll link to the postings in other locations, so you can find them all in one spot. If you are a current client, thank you for your business. Our future clients can find out about what we’ve been up to, here on the newsletter.

Sign up for more info on the right (you’ll get our free posts, but no one will bother you), or email us at:

info@SixFootLever.com

Thank you for reading!
Darren Dawes

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