As per research, festival spending begins in October itself and not November.

So be smart and think through these 7 festive season marketing strategies (for B2B and B2C businesses) right away in order to binge on more sweet profits this festive season!

1. Email Customized Festive Season Greetings

Consider your favorite brand in the world sends you a beautiful bouquet of flowers, hamper of exotically flavored chocolates and a handwritten note greeting you festive happiness. How would you feel? Special, won’t you?

Treat customers and partners like your extended family! Draft a beautiful email, pampering them with customized season’s greetings, gift hampers or a voucher sitting in their inbox (if not to their address). This makes your customers sensitive to your business presence and also shoots word-of-mouth appreciation in their neighborhood and amongst friend circles. Thus, increasing your customer base and profit too.

Here’s a precise resource on how to write effective emails for sales. But if you think you need to enhance your email writing skill then read these 5 ways to improve emailers for your business.

2. Be Creative On Social Media

Social media and website are the places where your customers and partners first find and know you. Keep your online presence especially social media updated and creative.

• A simple seasons’ greeting post can also make a lot of difference to your followers. It gives a sense of consideration.

Image Sources: PayUmoney’s Facebook

• Run contests to improve engagement and to interact with your audience directly. If you think “contest” means giving prizes to the winners, then yes, that’s what I am asking you to do. Prizes don’t have to be pricey. You can invest a minimum amount but what you win back is priceless! Remember this is a one-time expense.
• If still ‘contests’ seem like a not-so-great idea, then make testimonial videos and post them across your social media channels. Testimonial videos include your customer’s or partner’s experience and what they have to say about your business. This will bring a lifelong value to your business. You can tag your costumers or partners in the video, description or comment as a cherry on the cake!

3. Offer Samples & Discounts

Today we live in a trial economy, where everything needs to be tried before the actual purchase. In supermarkets, you must have noticed a couple of salespersons selling tasters of a particular food item for free. This allows people to experience the product first and then make a purchase decision. Basically, by introducing trials for your products you are inviting people to judge your product. This, in turn, helps you to understand the true need of your customers and create apt products.

Discounts and sales during festive season are marketer’s favorite strategies during festivals. E-commerce businesses make the most of this: Big Festive Sales, Festive Dhamaka, etc is introduced in order to gain more traction. Also, consumers usually pile up their piggy banks for ‘Sales’ during the festive season. Make the most of this strategy for your SMB.

1. List down all the festivals (big and small)
2. Mention the products you want to put up on sale
3. Spread the word about these products via email, social media, phone calls, SMS
4. Allow your consumers to try your product first
5. Follow the points listed below

4. Participate In Online & Offline Community Markets

Community marketing is a very prominent part of digital marketing. Earlier offline communities were set up in the form of flea markets, exhibitions, town hall markets and so on. Today, all these communities have settled down online as well. Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest have people from all walks of life and countries grouping up to form a common interest community.

Eg: Communities like the social pop shop or social crafts are created for people who want to sell or showcase their talent related to the community interest.

• The social pop shop – Lifestyle
• Social Crafts – Craft/ Art

5. Plan Simple Costumer Journey

Journeys are the ones which decide what goes next to your customer in the form of communication. This could be an engaging post on your social media channels, a follow-up email or SMS, new product updates as push notifications or simple banners or pop-ups in your website. This journey needs to be a part of the entire campaign, where the consumer is notified about your products simultaneous on different platforms.

Make sure you don’t bombard them with messages because this can increase your spam risk instead of your business. Pick the best channel and select the right time to send updates to your consumers.

6. Cross & Upsell Your Products Smartly

If your consumer wants to buy a notepad, then what is the harm in pushing them to buy a super smooth and fine quality pen? Cross and upselling is one of the keys to unlock the shackles of increasing sales. You are well versed with BOGO (buy one get one) or BOGF (buy one get one free) concepts. This is nothing but upselling. Cross-selling is selling a pen along with a notepad. You consumers are always looking for convenience. Sell your products conveniently to them.

7. Make Ad Spends Wisely

• Myth: Advertising is expensive and meant only for big businesses.
• Myth busted: Small businesses can make the most of advertising as well with cost as low as Rs.100 – 500!

Digital advertising is not expensive as traditional advertising (newspapers, radio, hoardings, etc). You can spend wisely by running test ads with a minimal budget at first. Depending on the response increase your budget to its best (according to you) and increase your business awareness as well.

Eg: if you spend Rs. 500 (keeping this as high value) you can reach out to approx 1000 – 2000 audiences in one go.

To maximize your marketing efforts on social media, discover the commonly made Facebook advertising mistakes you should avoid now.

Competition is on an all-time rise with multiple businesses offering similar products with enhanced price, quality or feature. In such scenarios, festivals are a hot season for marketers to push their products forth. In this crowded economy, these 7 festive season marketing strategies prove to be subtle but leave a high impact on your audiences in the (near) future. Gorge on these festive season marketing strategies to improve your marketing efforts and sales this festive season!

With all your marketing efforts for your business in place, it’s a good idea to have an all-in-one payment solution in place as well. Now to enjoy the best payment gateway experience and grow your business effortlessly!

The post 7 Unique Festive Season Marketing Strategies For Small Businesses appeared first on PayU Blog.

How To Do YouTube Marketing: A Success Story

ALS Ice Bucket Challenge

This viral marketing effort is no mystery or an unknown fact to anyone today. It all began with a small idea generated by an NGO making die-hard efforts to save patients infected with ALS disease. The popular challenge centered around a basic concept of :

• Dump a bucket full of ice water
• Capture it in a format
• Upload on social media with relevant hashtags (#)

In no time the challenge became a hit among the young and old! As per curated numbers, approximately 3,07,600 posts were created on Facebook and Twitter. YouTube was buzzing with celebrity videos performing the challenge. The final outcome of this innovative activity was, it helped raise $115 million in a short time span.

Hence, ALS Ice Bucket challenge is considered as a classic example of zero budget marketing efforts. Watch the video here:

Video Source: The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon

What Type Of Video Work Best On YouTube

1. Explainer & Tutorial Videos: Well-designed How-to guides are always helping and leaves your customers with satisfaction.
2. Thought Leader Interviews: Interviews with industry experts or thought leaders can help you amplify your company’s credibility on the platform and in the industry.
3. Video Blogs/ Vlogs: Vlogs are video form of expressing your blog. There are many ways to create quick and attractive vlogs to gain more viewers!
4. Customer Testimonial: These kinds of videos work the best to gain customer and user trust. Remember, a happy customer is your biggest asset!
5. Product Demonstrations: Demonstration videos are short videos with quality content. They are used to show the benefits of using the product.

[bctt tweet=”Interesting Fact: There are approximately 5 billion video views on YouTube every day!” username=”PayUmoney”]

How To Do YouTube Marketing?

With over 1.5 billion users worldwide, creating and managing a YouTube channel is no cake walk. To make it simple, we have divided the process into 6 simple steps.

Step 1: Create Your YouTube Channel

YouTube has made it very simple for anyone to create a channel. Follow these steps:

1. ‘Sign In’ to YouTube and click on the user icon on top right.
2. Now click on ‘Create A New Channel’.
3. Enter the relevant details like your business name, logo and click on ’Create’.

Pro Tip: Add an appealing cover image and customize you or channel. YouTube recommends uploading 2560*1440-pixel image with the maximum size of 4 MB!

Step 2: Create High-Quality Videos

Today, there are a number of online tools available to create beautiful videos in no time. Keep your video rich in both: content and the quality! Remember, the average watch time of YouTube video is 2 minutes. You can also read our blog on Video Marketing: Top Trends Of 2018.

Step 3: Upload Videos

Now that you are here, post a short video that explains what your business caters to. Keep it short, on-point and high resolution. Ideally, your video can range from 720p to 1080p which is considered high definition (HD) on YouTube.

Step 4: SEO Optimized Description

Above everything, describe in detail what your video speaks about. Keep your description SEO optimized. Add tags and place them in the right category. This will help you to increase the visibility of your video. Since there is so much video content created daily, you need to make an effort to stand out!

Pro-tip: Add CTA in all your YouTube videos so that the viewers know where they can find your content online.

Step 5: Distribute Your Videos

Ones you have created and uploaded videos on your YouTube channel, allow viewers from different platforms to find them. Some of the platforms can be:

Step 6: Analyze Your Efforts!

Since you have invested a lot of time and effort in the creation of a video, make sure you analyze the statistics of your videos. Visit YouTube analytics to have a look at your YouTube marketing performance. You can select the time frame or custom choose the date range filter.

Here are top YouTube analytics to look at:

• Watch Time: Shows the estimated total minutes spent by people in watching your content.
• Traffic Sources: Allows you to track the platform from which your visitor landed on your video.
• Demographics: Lets you know from which part of the world your viewers are from.
• Subscribers: Gives you an idea of how many people subscribed/ unsubscribed from your channel.

Today, videos are highly preferred as compared to a written form of content. YouTube marketing is evolving since it’s advent and it holds a lot of potential for your business growth, if done the right way! Hence, grasp all these 6 steps of how to do YouTube marketing thoroughly and implement it in your marketing plan to witness a skyrocketing business growth.

With all your marketing efforts for your business in place, it’s a good idea to have an all – in- one payment solution in place as well. Now enjoy the best payment gateway experience and grow your business effortlessly!

The post How To Do YouTube Marketing For Businesses In 2018 appeared first on PayU Blog.

Snapchat, Instagram or Facebook, videos rank on the top when it comes to best engagements. Be it establishing a brand, building customer rapport or promoting services or products video content marketing is used for almost everything. After all, there is a reason behind why 87% of online marketers use video content marketing! Recently, the “LIVE” feature, which initially started off with Facebook, and then on Instagram and Twitter is an instant trick to gain traction to your business. Let’s explore some more highly successful and conversion friendly video content marketing trends here.

What Is Video Content Marketing?

Despite the term being self-explanatory, it suggests, one of the most attractive and effective way to share your content: in a video format, where the basic content is supported with visuals and audio. The way it had evolved in the past decade is surprising and that’s the reason behind the buzz about how video marketing can accelerate your brand’s presence 10x! 

A recent report released by one of the leading marketing websites mentioned:  

• 81% of businesses use video as a marketing tool
• Also, video content is more memorable when compared to text and images

Benefits Of Video Content Marketing 

Certain interesting findings about video content and its benefits in our lives point to the certain astonishing facts such as:

• More than half of the people agree that if both text and video are available on the same topic, they are more likely to choose a video.
• It is a human tendency to capture things well when it gets an audio and visual of any thing.
• 1/3 of people’s online activity is spent watching videos.

Thus, creating useful and impactful videos makes a lot of sense if you are aiming to grow your business. While you design your videos with the help of certain creation tools mentioned later in the blog,  here are a few things we want you to keep a check on: 

1. Have your content in place to avoid last minute rush and stress
2. List down all the topics you want to cover in your video. Here having a storyboard will help you immensely
3. Select the most viewed and popular platforms you want to host it on 
4. Measure the video performance which includes: views, shares, comments, video view duration, etc.

Some Of The Most Effective Video Content Types Include:   

After getting a gist about what video content marketing is, the next question is, where and how can you create those videos and where can you host them? We have listed below some of the best tools to create videos! 

Top Platforms To Create Video Content 

Some easy, quick and amazing video platforms that allows you to create videos are: 

• Animoto: It is a cloud-based video creation platform which enables you to upload photos, videos, clips and audios within minutes!
• PowToon: It simply makes animation a layman’s job! It is an animated video creation tool to promote your business aggressively on social media channels directly.
• iMovies: One of the add-on that Macintosh users gets is iMovies! Create videos just like a pro with iMovies. You can support your videos with animations, music and voiceovers.
• Moovly: For all those who want drag, drop and animate feature while creating a video, this one is for you! Use hundreds of interesting templates and create clusters of video, in short duration. 

Best Practices For Video Content Marketing 

• Let people connect and understand 
• Keep it short and crisp 
• Remember humor is the best medicine 
• Maintain consistency 
• Optimize your video 
• Take them to the right place by giving an effective Call To Action (CTA) 

Now that you know the right ways and platforms to create your videos, all you need to do is read our recent blog on a step to step guide to perfect content distribution strategy. Grow your business with the right marketing strategies and stay tuned with PayUmoney blog.

With all your marketing efforts for your business in place, it’s a good idea to have an all – in- one payment solution in place as well. Now to enjoy the best payment gateway experience and grow your business effortlessly! 

The post Video Content Marketing: Top Trends Of 2018 appeared first on PayU Blog.