Someone working on a laptop beside a cup of coffee

Video is becoming a dominant tool in marketing. More people are consuming video content each day, and all the major social media apps, including Facebook and Instagram are pivoting to emphasize video to compete with the continued interest in YouTube and the rise of TikTok. To help you create great video advertising and social media, we discuss the role of video marketing for your business and the biggest trends and best practices to follow for 2023.

The Impressive Results of Video Marketing

Video marketing’s role has only grown this past decade as online video has become more and more widespread and easy to share. In 2018, already 78% of marketers found video marketing produced great ROI. This year, that’s grown to 92%. A study from Wyzowl also found that 79% of customers say a video has convinced them to purchase a service or product, while 91% want to see more video content from the brands they follow. Those numbers reflect not only the efficacy of video marketing, but also how its role as a marketing asset is growing.

Standing Out – The Role of Video Marketing

Video marketing plays a vital role by allowing your brand to show off more of its personality and character. Video ads and social media are great for showing off products, services, and your business in action. However, with video marketing also becoming a standard and a common part of most marketing strategies, you need to ensure your video gets attention by following leading trends and best practices. 

The Best Trends and Practices for 2023

To help your videos stand out, we’ve assembled some of the trends and best practices for 2023 to help your videos get those views they deserve.

Short Videos

As the rapid growth of TikTok shows, short videos get a lot of attention and are extremely effective for getting views. In fact, two-thirds of consumers found short videos more engaging, impactful, and memorable than longer videos. Although TikTok’s future in Canada might be a little unclear, since it has been banned on government employee phones, even Ottawa still recognizes the power of short videos for marketing. Other social media platforms have as well. Instagram launched Reels and YouTube launched Shorts in 2020. These short videos are an effective way to market parts of your business, especially since all three platforms prioritize these shorter videos for their users.

The Perfect, Endless Loop Keeps Them Watching

Along with short videos, the endless loop has become a best practice for increasing views and engagement. Together, looping and brevity cooperate to create snappy videos that your audience watches multiple times. Those multiple views will also give your video preference in the platform’s algorithm, so loops are great for growing your video’s reach. An easy way to create a seamless loop is to have the final moments of the video be the same shot or a few seconds earlier in the clip that starts the video. 

SEO

Short length and multiple views from seamless loops will optimize your videos for the suggestion algorithms. There are also methods to boost your videos’ SEO, especially any longer videos that won’t have these benefits. Properly title your videos to match search terms and include keywords in the descriptions. Focus videos on addressing questions and educating your audience; people are often looking for answers. Your videos will also receive SEO preference if you post consistently. 

Faces in Thumbnails

Another tactic is including human faces in thumbnails. You have surely noticed that a lot of video thumbnails on YouTube and other platforms often include people with emotive facial expressions. The simple reason is that those videos get more attention and views. People are naturally drawn to human faces, and expressive faces attract our interest. As a result, at least 72% of popular videos on YouTube include a human face.

Silent Videos with Captions

Besides what will help your video get immediate attention and clicks, you need to create videos that people want to watch and engage with. One of the best practices that has developed in the last couple years is ensuring your video can be watched silently. Many of your audience will watch your videos in a setting where they can’t or prefer not to have audio on. As a result, you need to add accurate captions so that anyone can watch the video without sound. Otherwise, they will simply move on. All platforms include automatic tools to help you generate those captions, but you need to edit them thoroughly for accuracy. This will make your videos both watchable in complete silence as well as more accessible to those with hearing difficulties.

Creating Real Moments – Live Video and Stories

Another great way to generate engagement and attention in your video marketing is creating momentary content with live video and short-lived videos like Instagram Stories. Since these are time limited or specific to the moment, they create FOMO (a fear of missing out). Thus, live videos and interactive Stories are fantastic ways to directly engage with your audience, as they want to become a part of the moment themselves by participating in the chat, reacting, or providing their own input. This, in turn, forms real connections with your audience. 

Being “Real” – Raw Video, Behind the Scenes, and User-Generated Content

Since live content and stories are typically more “raw” and often show behind-the-scenes (BTS) footage, they capitalize on a trend that emphasizes your brand’s authenticity. Less edited videos that show your business’ operations provide your audience with a more sincere presentation. Similarly, reposting and sharing user-generated video content is a great way to show your brand’s authenticity and its engagement with its audience. 

Video Marketing 

Thanks to the ubiquity of smart phones, it has only become easier to start creating video content, and its growing popularity means it’s essential for your marketing. If you want to ensure your video marketing is following the latest trends and best practices, contact our advertising team to create attention-grabbing video ads. Our social media team will help ensure your video content is engaging. Plus, if you’re looking for some more professionally shot and edited content, be sure to look at our video packages.

Amazon Vine Voice Reviews on a laptop and phone.

When you’ve hummed and hawed over that next purchase on Amazon, you have probably perused the reviews and come upon an Amazon Vine Voice badge.  Those reviews come from certain individuals who are part of the Amazon Vine program, an invitation-only review program. This program helps small businesses get verified reviews for their products when they have yet to receive many from customers. It also, however, comes with certain caveats. We’ll explain the details of what Amazon Vine is, what are some of its limitations, and why you might benefit from it.

What is Amazon Vine?

Amazon Vine is a program where reviewers called Vine Voices can receive free products to write reviews for the product pages that express their “unbiased opinions – positive, neutral or negative.” It originally began in 2007 as monthly emails that featured product reviews. By 2011, as Amazon’s inventory and number of Voices grew, the emails became unwieldy, and one could feature over 400 reviews. As a result, the program was overhauled in 2016 to its current form, where reviews became featured on the individual product page above other reviews with a prominent “Vine Voice” badge.

Who are the Vine Voices?

Anyone can become a Vine Voice, the unpaid reviewers of Amazon Vine. However, they first need to be invited to the program by Amazon. That invitation only comes after someone consistently leaves fair and detailed reviews about the products they purchase. After enough reviews have been written and rated highly by other users, Amazon will invite that account to become a voice for the Vine platform. Similarly, Amazon regularly removes Voices who stop writing reviews or break their terms of agreement, although it is not always apparent to these reviewers why they lose access.

Once they join the platform, Vine Voices can access a special product feed on Amazon of items targeted towards their interests that need reviews. The products offered have little to no reviews; this ensures Vine Voices are focused on vetting less popular or well-known products. Any of the products they request are shipped to them for free with the requirement that they use it and write a detailed review. Those reviews are then featured on the product page above all other users.

Whose Products Can be Reviewed on Amazon Vine?

Since 2019, third-party sellers have been able to enter their products into the Amazon Vine system to receive reviews from Vine Voices. To enroll as a seller in Amazon Vine you must pay a $200 enrollment fee and be a registered seller. Once in the service, you may offer your products for review provided that the item:

  • Has less than 30 reviews
  • Has already launched and is available for purchase
  • Is an FBA (fulfilled by Amazon) offer with the “New” condition
  • Is not an “adult” item
  • Has available inventory
  • Its listing has an image and description

So long as it meets all those criteria, the product can be offered to Amazon Voices for free so that they will write a review.

What are the Benefits of Amazon Vine?

Amazon Vine can be beneficial to smaller companies who offer their products through Amazon because they can provide less popular products with reviews, which are central to online shopping. 93% of customers state that reviews impact their purchase decisions, and studies have found that a product is up to 270% more likelyto be purchased if it has at least 5 reviews. Furthermore, on Amazon, positively reviewed products are given priority in product feeds and searches. 

Therefore, Vine helps small businesses get those reviews because it only offers products with a few reviews for Voices to review. If your products are high quality, you can expect good reviews. Those reviews are extra valuable because they are verified and vetted. The general probability of a purchase increases by 15% if a review is a verified purchase. That verification along with the priority display and status of a Vine review can be only more convincing.

What are the Limitations of Amazon Vine?

Vine and Voices can be an excellent way to secure reviews and reach on Amazon, but there are a few caveats to the program. There is no guarantee that a Vine Voice will request your product or provide you with a stellar review. The reviews are also nominally anonymous because Amazon does not require Voices to use their real name. However, there’s little incentive for a Voice to maliciously leave a false review; it is a breach of the program. If Amazon finds their review misleading, such as by a seller’s appeal, the review will be erased and the Voice’s membership revoked. Yes, that anonymity can undermine their credibility and they are less recognizable compared to a product review from a well-known influencer.

Some other factors to consider are the program’s cost. There are no payments besides the initial fee. However, products must be provided for free to incentivize the otherwise uncompensated Voices to write reviews. That isn’t necessarily unusual for professional reviews. Products are typically ‘gifted’ to influencers and professional critics for their publicized and expert opinions, but Voices also aren’t professional reviewers, nor experts, which can limit the quality of their reviews. Furthermore, if your products are expensive, large, or heavy, it will inherently mean a higher investment to ship free products for these reviews. This can make Vine better suited towards lower-priced items that sell more frequently. That positive attention can get your brand wider recognition on Amazon, leading to potential sales and natural customer reviews of those big-ticket products.

Growing Vines and Settling Roots

Hopefully, you now have a good sense of what Amazon Vine and Voices are, along with the benefits and limitations of the program for small businesses. If you’re interested in adding your products to Amazon Vine or discovering other methods to expand your store’s reach, be sure to contact Rosewood Marketing. We will be happy to strategize and discuss various options in both e-commerce design and marketing.

A robot using a phone and writing in a notebook with a pen.

If you’ve spent any time on social media or the internet at large lately, you’ve seen AI (artificial intelligence) has become a hot topic. Services like ChatGPT and DALL-E2 and their AI generated content have been featured in countless articles and posts. These conversations aren’t about a malicious AI like Skynet, HAL 9000, the Cylons, or Ultron of science fiction. Instead, these AI are learning programs currently in development that have become capable of generating creative content like images, art, and text. Naturally, this has created a lot of discussion about the capabilities, uses, and ethics of these kinds of programs. Rosewood Marketing is here to help you get caught up with everything you need to know about AI-generated content.

What is AI?

Let’s start with the basic: what is AI? AI in science fiction has typically referred to fully sentient artificial beings, usually computers, androids, or robots. These are not the AI were dealing with in reality… yet. Instead, AI currently refers to programs that use machine learning to more effectively complete tasks. These programs “learn” by running training data through algorithms to learn concepts and associations. They then make decisions or predictions without needing direct programming. These algorithms are now used in numerous places such as search engines, photo editing, web design, recommendation systems, language translation, chatbots, and far more. The technology has proved vital in being able to parse the massive amount of data now available on the internet. 

The Need to Know on AGI (Artificial Generative Intelligence)

Most major tech companies currently have their own AI development projects and divisions, including GoogleMicrosoftAppleMeta, etc. These are for various applications, most of which are primarily still for backend services. Typically, users don’t directly engage with or realize they are using AI programs. 

Generative AI, however, are ones the wider public has more actively interacted with lately and are responsible for the wave of AI generated content. These AIs are designed to generate visual, audio, or textual content based on user inputs. OpenAI is currently one of the recognized industry leaders in developing generative AIs. They’re responsible for both ChatGPT and DALL-E2, whose respective text and image generations have been all over the internet lately. OpenAI’s technology has also been used in partnership by Microsoft, who is currently using it for developing a “new Bing.” Nor is OpenAI alone. Midjourney is another major image generating AI that has become popular.

These programs accept textual prompts or commands and then generate content in response. Overall, the current general interest comes from both programs’ adequate ability to fulfill those requests. The sudden popularity is the result of OpenAI and other services recently making the programs available to the public. ChatGPT is currently free to use for its research and development, while Dall-E2 and Midjourney comes with a set of free uses with more available for purchase. 

Benefits of AI Generated Content

The benefits of AI generated content are immediately clear. With simple prompts users can create full pieces of text, lines of programming code, a sound bite of a person’s voice saying a specific phrase, or custom visual art faster than a human could ever produce and without that effort. The sudden impact of AI generated content is because of its immediately impressive ability to generate content from simple commands. These AI can greatly benefit content creation by speeding up the process and reducing human workload. Imagine being able to just give the prompt “Write a blog telling me everything I need to know about AI generated content” and getting a full article like this in a few seconds.

Drawbacks of AI Generated Content

That, at least, is the ideal. A lot of work needs to be done before AI generated content, replaces human creators, if ever. It is true that the creations of generative AI are already staggeringly impressive. While these AI are quite capable at creating certain kinds of art or texts, they immediately falter at more complex tasks. AI generations of humans have become infamous for their monstrous hands. CNET had recently used AI to write its articles, but after a review found more than half of those articles had serious errors, they paused further use. AI can only generate content as well as they have been trained, and right now AI generation remains at a stage that is an advanced technological parrot. It’s ability to create is impressive, but it does not actually “know” what it’s doing.

Where will AI generated content go?

Currently AI generated content isn’t quite up to par with human creativity and expertise. For simple tasks, however, AI are already producing staggering results. Along with the need for additional development, there are also current ethical concerns and debates about these generative AI. They have been trained on a wide set of creations by artists who did not give explicit permission for this machine training. As a result, AI generated content has raised debates about whether these programs are stealing from other human creators. That has only become more complicated with concerns that these AI will replace human artists and creators

On the other hand, AI generated content can be a powerful creative tool. Artists have been using generative AI in their work for decades, such as Harold Cohen’s AARON. Ultimately, creators and industries will adapt to how AI generated content develops and can be most effectively used. It’s a powerful tool, and just like any new tool, it needs to settle into its appropriate uses. If you’re interested in current AI applications for your business’ website, check out this blog and contact our web design team. You can also discuss with Rosewood’s marketing team about the current uses of AI generated content in marketing.