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8 Best Video Hosting Sites for Businesses in 2021

Video Marketing
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8 Best Video Hosting Sites for Businesses in 2021 In middle school, my best friend and I used to have a show on YouTube where we performed a dare from our audience each week. We actually had some fans that would watch our videos and dare us to do something on a weekly basis. While hosting these types of videos on YouTube made sense because they were for entertainment purposes, your business needs a platform with more features so you can create videos for marketing campaigns, sales pitches, and customer service knowledge base articles. In this post, let's review some of the best video hosting sites for your business. Video Platforms 1. HubSpot If you're a HubSpot customer, you might already have access to HubSpot's video hosting, creation, and management tool. With this tool, you can host and manage video files inside the HubSpot platform and then embed those videos on your website pages, blog posts, social media channels, or knowledge base. Using the same platform that you use for your marketing, sales, or service tool is a great idea because everything is all in one place. You can optimize your videos for SEO right in the tool. This video hosting product also allows you to insert CTAs and forms into videos, trigger video workflows that provide targeted content to leads, and video analytics so you know which videos resonate with your audience. For sales reps, you can use the video hosting tool to send video voicemails...

How to Write the Perfect Email to Apply for an Unlisted Role [Infographic]

Job Search
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How to Write the Perfect Email to Apply for an Unlisted Role Maybe you've been refreshing the Careers page at your dream company for months. Alternatively, perhaps you've heard glowing reviews about a company from friends — but whenever you check, they're still not hiring for any roles for which you'd qualify. Whatever the case, if you feel a company's culture could be a great fit for you, you might consider sending a cold email so hiring managers can keep you in-mind if a role becomes available. But that's easier said than done. If you sound too pushy, you risk alienating the hiring manager. A good cold email should be concise and focus on how you can add value to the team. When done correctly, a cold email is a good opportunity to network and get your name in front of the right people. Fortunately, the folks at Resume.io put together an infographic, which details the 8 essential elements of a persuasive email you can use to apply at your dream company. Take a look now, and then check out How to Write a Letter of Interest in 2021 . ...

What Does it Mean to Use Concatenate in Excel [+ Why It Matters]

Excel
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What Does it Mean to Use Concatenate in Excel Copy and paste shortcuts are handy until you have hundreds of data points to manually combine and reformat. Fortunately, you can use the CONCATENATE Excel function to save time (and curb carpal tunnel) when joining information from cells, rows, or columns. Meaning "to join together" or "to combine," concatenate is a way to unite the contents of two or more cells into one cell. The function allows you to combine data from columns, cells, ranges, and rows into whatever format you desire, making it easy to quickly join names and addresses or properly display dates and times. There are various ways to set up the CONCATENATE formula in Excel, so we'll walk through the steps required to use this function and achieve your worksheet goals. How to Concatenate in Excel While there are several ways to combine text in Excel worksheets, we'll be focusing on the CONCATENATE function. It combines the contents of two or more cells into one cell without physically changing the shape of the cell and is often used to join pieces of text (called text strings or strings) from individual cells into one cell. The resulting text string is the combination of all strings in your CONCATENATE formula. Here's a look at how to concatenate in Excel: Let's say you have a list of customers whose first and last names are separate. You need everyone's full names to build a retargeting campaign, so you want to join...

How to Calculate Standard Deviation in Excel, and Why It Matters for Marketers

Excel
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How to Calculate Standard Deviation in Excel, and Why It Matters for Marketers If you’ve ever taken a statistics class, the words ‘standard deviation’ might intimidate you. This complex formula provides insightful information for datasets that averages alone cannot reveal, and thankfully, Excel makes calculating this statistic easier than putting pencil to paper. Standard deviation is frequently used by financial professionals as it can help determine risks in stock portfolios and is often applied to return on investment (ROI). For marketing professionals, standard deviation can reveal variabilities and risks in datasets that will ultimately help guide campaign decisions. What is standard deviation? Simply put, standard deviation is a mathematical term that measures the variation in a set of values. In marketing, standard deviation can help account for widely varying costs or sales. If the numbers in a data set are spread far apart, they have a higher standard deviation. This measurement can help assess risk when deciding how much budget can be allocated toward certain campaigns based on the standard deviation of the ROI, just to name one example. How to Calculate Standard Deviation in Excel There are six standard deviation formulas in Excel, which will be used based on whether you need to calculate sample standard deviation or population standard deviation. This is easy to identify in Excel, as the three formulas for population standard deviation include a P (.P, PA, or P at the end of STDEV). STDEV.S STDEVA STDEV STDEV.P, STDEVPA, STDEVP...

The Best Video Formats on Instagram [New Data]

Instagram Marketing
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The Best Video Formats on Instagram As a millennial, it's no surprise that Instagram is one of my favorite social media platforms. This network is the third most popular social media site for Gen Z and millennial audiences. While scrolling through the site is the easiest thing to do, posting the right content for your audience isn't. As a marketer, you've probably wondered what type of Instagram content would perform the best for your audience. To help you, we decided to ask consumers what type of video formats they watch the most. In this post, you'll learn what video format users like to watch on Instagram, and what size, length, and aspect ratio those videos should be. Best Video Format for Instagram Instagram is extremely popular, but did you know there is more than one kind of video format you could use for your content? To find out which is the most popular we surveyed more than 300 people to see which videos they watch the most. Ultimately, Instagram Story videos were the most popular video format to watch on the social media site, with 43% of those surveyed watching this type of video content the most. Besides survey respondents who didn't use Instagram, the next highest video format to watch were live videos and then videos shared directly in the feed. The least popular video formats to watch on Instagram were Instagram Reels and IGTV, with only 19% and 13% of respondents watching them respectively. To...

How Consumer Spending Habits Could Change in 2021 [New Data]

Marketing Trends
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How Consumer Spending Habits Could Change in 2021 As businesses and economies closed down due to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, consumers also tightened up their budgets. According to data from McKinsey, most consumers were more conscientious about purchases than before the pandemic. Because of this, most households primarily budgeted around essential products and services. But, now, as economies begin to swiftly reopen following mass vaccinations, business owners and marketers might also be wondering what this could mean for the next year of revenue. Specifically, many business leaders are asking, "Will consumers continue to spend cautiously, or will they spend more freely in 2021?" To help businesses prepare and navigate for the coming months, I asked nearly 300 random consumers, "Which best describes your budgeting plan for the next year?" Here's what they said and tips for how to navigate future spending behaviors. How Consumers Will Spend Money in the Next Year As economies reopen, people return to work, and household revenues start to rise again, you might think that people will be racing to online or physical stores to shop for all the things they didn't have the budget for in 2020. However, when looking at the results of our small survey, it seems that people are cautiously optimistic about their 2021 budget. Although one-third of respondents say they plan to "loosen" their budgets and spend more money than they did in 2020, a whopping 43% plan to keep the same budget they had in 2020. Meanwhile,...

The Ultimate Guide to Relationship Marketing

Marketing Strategy
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The Ultimate Guide to Relationship Marketing There are plenty of studies that highlight the importance of customer retention — oftentimes, customer retention has been found to be even more critical to your company's success than customer acquisition.Frederick Reichheld of Bain & Company found as little as a five percent increase in customer retention can result in an increase in company revenue by 25-95%. Adobe learned that returning customers spend more than newer customers. Why? Because existing customers understand the value of your products and services and they're invested loyally in your brand. If a customer feels satisfied with their interaction with you, it’s a no-brainer for them to turn to your business for their needs, again and again. No matter if you’re a team of one or leading a scaling enterprise, you can cultivate a deeper relationship with your existing audience without the typical costs associated with acquiring new customers. The key is strategic relationship marketing. “But isn’t all marketing relationship marketing?” Not exactly. Some marketing tactics are solely about gaining traffic and conversions to get potential customers into the customer flywheel. From there, you’ll have even more marketing tactics that get that potential customer to make their first purchase. The perfect time to start a relationship marketing strategy is when the customer has made a purchase (or several). Your goal with relationship marketing is to get these new customers to become brand-loyal patrons of your business. To do that, you’ll want to take a personalized approach and...

21 of the Best Brands on Instagram Right Now

Instagram Marketing
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21 of the Best Brands on Instagram Right Now Contrary to what your friends' photos suggest, Instagram isn't just a social network for selfies and brunch pics. In fact, Instagram has over 200 million businesses that use its platform and 90% of users follow at least one of them, according to 2019 data. In a time when visual content remains a crucial part of any brand's marketing strategy, Instagram marketing presents a unique opportunity to showcase your brand identity. Ready to get inspired? Check out this list of brands that are thriving on Instagram right now, and why their posts set them apart. Best Brands on Instagram What makes a brand great on Instagram? We polled 301 users across the United States, and asked “Which of the following describes the brands you follow and enjoy on Instagram?” These were their top answers: Data Source While this data is from a small sample, it does highlight what we already know about Instagram audiences. They look for: Content that relates to their lives: both personal and professional. Eye-catching, fun content. Product promotions What you'll see in the next section is that every brand featured meets these needs, earning them high follower counts and high engagement rates. Psst – Want to get a stunning Instagram Story auto-magically created for your brand? Check out StoriesAds.com, a free Story generator from HubSpot and Shakr. . 1. Netflix's Strong Black Lead Followers: 682k Here is an example...