What do you get when you combine slow-motion footage of dogs playing with over-the-top heavy metal music? Tons of fun and a message we can all get behind.
Check out this ad Shaddock Agency created for Drift (and crank up the volume when you do):
THE SHADDOCK REPORT
16
May
May
You’ve probably been hearing for a few years now that social video is THE hot way to attract attention to your brand.
Certainly the stats seem to bear this out. Per our friends at Hubspot:
- 81% of businesses use video as a marketing tool — up from 63%, the number reported in our 2017 survey.
- 99% of those who already do use video, say they’ll continue to do so in 2018.
- 65% of those who don’t currently use video, say they plan to start in 2018.
Hubspot also shared these compelling numbers:
- 97% of marketers say video has helped increase user understanding of their product or service.
- 76% say it helped them increase sales.
- 47% say it helped them reduce support queries.
- 76% say it helped them increase traffic.
- 80% of marketers say video has increased dwell time on their website.
- 95% of people have watched an explainer video to learn more about a product or service.
- 81% of people have been convinced to buy a product or service by watching a brand’s video.
- 69% of people have been convinced to buy a piece of software or application by watching a video.
- 85% of people say they’d like to see more video from brands in 2018.
Making videos can be a ton of fun and a terrific creative outlet, but hiring a pro can be really expensive. If you’re a good storyteller at your core, though, an online video-making tool can be all you need to create snappy content.
Animoto and I had a brief fling last year (you can see a couple of videos I made with it here and here) but after that I went through an extended iMovie phase, in part because Animoto didn’t support custom fonts. I do love the endless tinkering I can do with iMovie, but that also ends up being something of a time suck. Animoto is ridiculously easy to use and pleasingly efficient. And that’s why it’s drawn me back — that and its delicious assortment of music clips. Check out the short video I created this weekend for Gutsy Broads:
Do you like it? Want me to make one for you? Hit me up.
12
Dec
Dec
A few years ago, when I was still a digital financial-news manager, it wasn’t uncommon for me to edit 15 pieces in one day. And write two myself. And manage the homepage. And work on SEO. And edit the day’s headlines. And put out the various fires that were bound to spring up no matter how well we’d planned our coverage.
When I first made the leap into corporate editing, I couldn’t believe how much slower-paced it was. It made me twitchy.
I needed to type — type fast and type long. For those of us who grew up in a newsroom, the manpower-to-output ratio in today’s marketing departments defies reason. It shouldn’t take a whole week to write a banner headline. It shouldn’t take a whole month to create a landing page.
Thankfully, as this year-old-but-still-relevant piece from The Guardian points out, copywriting has evolved to require quite a bit of typing. Nowadays, copywriters get to create blog posts, video scripts, emails, banner ads, social media posts and more. And what more companies are starting to discover is that a journalist can do all of this in a day — and still have time for more creative work.
What a glorious turn of events for journalists like me.
Content marketing has brought new talent into the advertising industry, but these are different beasts to the traditional copywriter
Source: Copywriting is dead? Don’t tell the journalists | Media Network | The Guardian
02
Oct
Oct
Outside of the media industry, journalists get a bad rap. We’re unduly nosy. We’re contrary. We’re know-it-alls. We have unfathomably messy desks. Speaking as an insider, I can attest that all of these things are true.
But you might not know that some of the traits found in successful journalists are uncannily useful in the business world — particularly in marketing and advertising.
Here’s why you should always hire a journalist to do a marketer’s job:
- We speak plain English, not marketing-ese.
- We thoroughly research our subjects before writing about them.
- We ask good questions.
- Writing fantastic headlines is all in a day’s work.
- We abhor typos and bloated language.
- We type really, really fast.
- We thrive on deadlines.
- We’re always grateful for work.
- We have a nose for what makes a subject unique — we can always find an angle.
The best journalists are adept not only at gathering information but weaving it into a story that captures their readers’ interest. Most reporters know that every story should answer the basic questions — Who? What? When? Where? — but the great ones also answer a fifth: “Why should this matter to me?”
Guess what? That’s marketing: discovering and exploiting what makes a brand unique and why the customer should care. Great marketers anticipate questions and convey the facts clearly. They know that to serve their clients they must first serve the customer. They’re not so different from great journalists.
Every business has a compelling story. We’ll help you tell yours. Email us today.
29
Jan
Jan
Today I had the pleasure of sharing my first contributor’s story on Gutsy Broads.
I know Lauren because of a gutsy decision she made several years ago: leaving an “Established News Organization” for the smaller, scrappier TheStreet.com.
Lauren was fierce from the get go. It was 2008, and all hell was breaking loose on Wall Street. If she had any doubts about her ability to report on the complicated, messy news of the day, you wouldn’t know it. She fearlessly tackled her beat, developing sources and breaking news with the confidence you’d expect in someone many years her senior. I and the other editors were impressed with this young woman. She had her act together, and she was going places.
I’ve followed Lauren and her career in the years since, and she’s even more of a powerhouse now. I hope that her story will inspire other women, as it has me.
28
Jan
Jan
Every day I shake my head in wonder that publishers don’t use all of the SEO tools at their disposal. Imagine my horror when I realized the title tags for every page and post on my own site were all the same:
Digital publishing news, commentary and advice | Sam Shaddock
And I was all:
This website is young enough that I don’t expect to have much search traffic yet, but I did install Yoast’s fantastic SEO plugin to increase my odds of ranking well. It’s an easy tool to set up and use. Just tell it how you want your title tags to render (the default pulls from the headline), and if you want to overwrite it, do so below the post. I’ve been using it to create search-friendly title tags while striving to maintain more conversational headlines. Or so I thought.
La, la, la. I’m so very clever. … Oh, wait.
In the past, that’s all I’ve had to do. Evidently, though, with some WordPress themes you have to take an extra step: checking the “force rewrite titles” box on the first tab in your SEO settings. (If that doesn’t work, try some of the suggestions in this WordPress forum.)
Now I’m back in business, but man, that was embarrassing.
26
Jan
Jan
I’ve resurrected the Gutsy Broads project. To kick things off, here’s a little first-person ditty I wrote about gutsiness.
More details to come!
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