Exante Striker V: Embrace the Past, Evolve with the Future

Entrepreneurs and business leaders are not easy professions. You will fall and have bad times, and even worse times. But your success won’t come if you stay down.

Here are some things you should keep in mind when you feel stuck or without luck:

1. It will pass.

Patience is a virtue and this saying rings true in whatever era.

2. Problems don’t solve themselves.

Don’t believe lazy principles that say problems will solve themselves – somewhere, somehow, someone does, and that’s how problems get solved. If you cannot solve a problem on your own, ask for help, or hire someone to fix it entirely.

3. A negative mindset brings no joy.

Celebrity author and influencer Marie Kondo popularised the idea of “letting go of things that do not bring you joy.” While it may not always be the best advice for businesses, it is indeed wise to sweep out pessimism and negativity, as it will not help in the long run.

Accepting and embracing the past also isn’t limited to just setbacks and growing back. It’s also about embracing the successes you have made previously, as well as successes others made in the past, too. Both can help you gain a futuristic approach.

As an example, leading automobile makers in Europe have accepted that electric cars are the proper future for personal vehicles – a responsible innovation that takes the environment into consideration. There are more green-tech items now in the market too, and not just cars – all thanks to futurists rightly predicting the state of the world’s environment and climate troubles after the industrial age.

Similarly one should build on the positive successes of earlier business leaders and adjust to the future with their wisdom. Build on the advancements of technology and use them to your advantage.

Learning how to put your wisdom into assessing the possibilities is not as hard as it seems. Entrepreneurs have a natural knack for looking ahead.

In 1999, Milton Friedman, an economist and Nobel Prize winner predicted that the world would one day build and need a reliable form of electronic currency – a laughingstock idea of his decade. Today, the world is increasingly gaining use for cryptocurrencies, and are becoming more stable as time goes by, with legacy financial institutions scrambling to get a hold of this“future money.”

Likewise, marketing has gone from traditional media to digital media, but people’s habits are still there – video remains as the most entertaining form of content, and more than 50% of consumers prefer it to written stories such as blogs or pure audio like podcasts.

As such, in 2017 studies have shown that 64% of consumers say seeing a marketing video on Facebook influenced their purchase decisions, and with 75% of millennials – the young, purchase-vicious market – love watching videos on social media, it’s an easy business decision.

Strike the iron while it’s hot!

Because of the popularity of Facebook and other social media, 93% of marketers say they’ve converted leads into customers through social media videos. Thanks to this development 41% of marketers planned adding Facebook video to their content strategy for 2018. More have integrated plans to add video to these top 2 other sites: Instagram and Youtube.

Creating video content is not an easy feat, but it can make wonders for your engagement rates and visits. If you feel kind of uneasy with being in front of a camera, you can always opt for using animated videos such as infographics and cartoons.

If you can’t make some on your own or with your in-house creative team, partner up with marketing agencies such as Exante Digital or dedicated creative content companies to produce videos for you.

Here are several things to keep in mind in making video content:

1. Keep it concise.

It doesn’t have to be long, and should not be too short either. What matters most is how accurately you get the message across.

2. Use updated research data.

Always use only the latest, most verified version of data when using them for your videos. Your audience or market will most likely dig around to verify too, and you should be the authority behind your content.

3. Create a unified visual theme and messaging.

Nobody likes an eyesore mishmash of disjointed visuals and themes when watching anything. Consult with design and content experts to create a polished look your audiences will love.

Trends change, however, and while video is still a popular medium, there is a related innovation that is fast gaining popularity within the turn of the decade: voice search.

Have you ever seen people walking around talking to their phones instead of actually someone on the other line?

Yes, AI and voice-related technology has improved so much that people now are making use of AI assistants they can talk to. Search engines have taken this functionality to a whole new level that most mobile phone users can now search the internet by simply asking their devices.

In 3Q of 2018, smart speaker device shipments have grown by 200% YOY globally, and related statistics show that 65% of adults aged 25-49 use voice-enabled devices at least once a day.

Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, and the Google Assistant are the top 3 in use today for many devices, which include phones, TVs, and media players. Their integration into everyday items, even cars – make it so convenient for users that marketers are finding more effective ways to be searched by people through this method.

Top research agencies are predicting that by 2022, voice will be a $40 billion channel, and that 2020 is the year of Voice Search with about 50% of all searches done in such a way.

Don’t get left behind. No matter what category you are in, you can utilise both video and voice search to drive sales and improve your business performance.

Improve your Voice Search affinity with these simple steps:

1. Build keywords

Create a database of your brand’s most important keywords. An SEO-fit set of keywords will help bring you up voice search results, as VS leans more towards Natural Language Processing or NLP.

2. Featured snippets

Also called “position zero” is the highlight “answer” to “questions” that are asked by users. For example your product is a trekking shoe brand – a concise summary such as “[name] is the professional trekking shoe for the outdoor sports and adventure enthusiast.”

3. Tailor to location

Google and most other search engines now take location as part of their surveying algorithm. As such, make your content open to optimisation for global deployment (for international websites) or tailored to search habits of locals.

The path of futuristic leaders is always risky. But as with all successful enterprises, taking educated risks is the best path to keep walking on. Are you ready for that?

Incorporating video content and voice search in your Content Strategy should be a must in your portfolio of assets. This is beyond brand-building; everyone will soon have both in their marketing briefcase. What will differentiate you is how you use these two innovations to build your community, rather than your brand or product image.

David Minife, CXO and EVP of Centene Corporation (a Medicaid managed care organisation), said that “Branding is dead and it’s (now) all about Community Activation and Relationship Building.”

True to this statement, marketing has indeed moved from traditional “chase the market” approach to Inbound marketing, and this movement is called Inbound Shifting. This approach banks on creating the best customer experience and valuable content for a company’s customers, which is why video marketing and voice search are indispensable tools for this marketing style.

What makes the Inbound approach and using voice search and video to augment it such an appealing tactic for audiences is its very human level of interaction: seeing and hearing.

This human to human, conversational interactivity for business removes a lot of potential friction, as audiences can relate more easily to the brand. Many business luminaries also believe this method is now extending towards a human yet automated approach – contrary as it may sound, which will be mentioned in the next Exante Striker.

In conclusion, welcome to the new world of video-savvy, voice-enabled marketing. Do not hesitate to embrace the failures and successes of the past, instead learn and build up from them, looking forward with masterful discipline, broad yet deep insight, and love for continuous development.

Embrace the futurist in you with these steps:

1. Forgive your mistakes and missteps

2. Learn from previous successes

3. Embrace new technologies: Video marketing and voice search

4. Keep yourself relevant to the market with a relationship approach

5. Be motivated to maximise new innovations to your advantage

Reach all the goals in this Striker and you can take your potential to success even further with Exante Striker VI. You can also consult with us at Exante and we can collaborate to ready your content as well as your business thought leadership capabilities for the future.