Kingston Lane, an innovative lead generation and marketing automation solution for real estate agents, will begin offering services in Australia and New Zealand in September after extensive and successful beta testing in both regions.

Kingston Lane’s unique solution to real estate marketing challenges has been proven throughout 2018 in the United States. Agents in Australia and New Zealand will be eligible to access the company’s growing suite of “5 clicks or less” localized lead gen, sales, and creative campaigns.

In addition to Kingston Lane’s push-button lead farming, coming-soon websites and email campaigns, the company will make available its Seller Analysis Tool (SAT), which will allow agents to offer leads and clients a well-rounded perspective on how their home might perform when released to the market.

The SAT will be accessed by Kingston Lane users via the software’s unique “push-button” UX, allowing agents to quickly and accurately attract leads and serve clients via a clean, streamlined dashboard with an ever-growing menu of fast-to-deploy creative and strategic tools.

New features, locations for geo-targeted farming and even currency options are made available automatically to customers upon launch. Agents will be able to create free accounts for Kingston Lane to test-drive its feature stack.

The launch times with Kingston Lane CEO Sharran Srivatsaa’s presentation at the fifth annual The Business of Real Estate conference, sharing his tips and best practices.

“I’m excited to introduce Kingston Lane to these real estate communities, ones that are smart and eager to adopt new tech, and to be a part of conference pushing so many new ideas,” said Mr Srivatsaa.

The presentation highlighted tactics and business realisations Mr Srivatsaa embraced during his time growing Teles Properties, which was sold to Douglas Elliman in 2017. The real estate entrepreneur has been featured in a host of business publications during his career, including Entrepreneur, The Wall Street Journal and Forbes.

Michael Sheargold, CEO of Real Estate Results Network and Founder of DRIVE Performance, said that he was thrilled to have Mr Srivatsaa at this year’s conference.

“Having Sharran at the Business of Real Estate this year was incredibly exciting for the delegates,” he said.

“For him to choose the conference as his platform to introduce the Australian and New Zealand markets to Kingston Lane is impressive. When you look at how this amazing marketing and lead generation solution has helped agents in the USA, it’s great to know our agents will soon have this advantage.”

The team from Productive and Free share their lead magnet ideas in this infographic.

Here are a few that make their list:

Check out the infographic for more.

A version of this post was first published on the Red Website Design blog.

Dive Insight:

Nike’s new ad inverts the brand’s classic slogan, “Just Do It,” by calling on people to “For Once, Don’t Do It,” as the company stakes its position in support of the growing number of people around the country angered by police brutality against black people, a position Nike has been cultivating in sometimes-controversial marketing over the past few years. The ad dropped as people in cities across America took to the streets to protest the death of George Floyd, who was killed in police custody in Minneapolis on Memorial Day.

Nike is leveraging the wide recognition of an iconic slogan meant to inspire people to be the best athletes they can be to drive eyeballs to a video that still hopes to encourage action, but around inspiring people to not be quiet about racism or social injustice or to think it doesn’t affect them.

“We hope that by sharing this film we can serve as a catalyst to inspire action against a deep issue in our society and encourage people to help shape a better future,” Nike said in statement in a CNBC report about the ad.

The message is in line with Nike’s support for social justice in recent years. For Nike’s 30th anniversary of its “Just Do It” campaign in 2018, the brand worked with Colin Kaepernick. The former quarterback was a divisive choice for the face of the campaign because he rose to prominence for protesting police brutality against African Americans by “taking a knee” during the singing of the national anthem at a game in 2016, an action that drew large groups of detractors as well as supporters.

While the campaign could have been a risk to Nike because of its potential to upset NFL executives, the company decided the risk was worth it if the campaign would engage a young urban market. Nike later reported that the campaign generated “record engagement with the brand” both negative and positive.

Nike continued its support of social justice for African Americans last year when it ceased distribution of its Air Max 1 Quick Strike Fourth of July sneaker because of a request by Kaepernick, who took issue with how the Betsy Ross-made flag image used on the shoe has been associated with the U.S. period of slavery, and because of the flag’s current use by extremist groups.​

The latest effort from Nike comes as consumer demands for brands to take the lead on putting people before profits have only grown louder during the coronavirus pandemic.

Indeed, Facebook recently noted that the number of people watching Facebook Live content has risen by 50% since January, while overall increases in digital video consumption have even forced the major providers to reduce their video quality in some regions to avoid over-straining networks. 

If you’re looking to engage your audience, video is now key. And for businesses in particular, it can be a powerful medium for your brand messaging.

Underlining this, the team from Elite Content Marketer have put together this overview of key video consumption stats to provide more context in your planning. Check out the infographic below, which was created no conjunction with Graphic Rhythm Designs. 

Email marketing and video are two services that can be combined and provide great results, because one is engaging and the other is cost-effective. What’s more, email marketing is the most affordable way to reach different audiences, as well as one of the easiest to measure.

There are a lot of different email marketing services—both and paid—that can offer you the same thing: a way to use video in email marketing.

But just incorporating video into your email marketing efforts isn’t enough.

Why Video in Email Marketing?

The obvious answer would be, “Because it’s engaging,” but is this true?

According to a report published by Forrester, video in email marketing can increase the click-through rate by as much as 300 percent.

Oh, and check this one out: “Marketers who use video grow revenue 49 percent faster than non-video users.”

A video increases click-through rate for emails, helps brands grow revenue way faster. What else can it do?

Video can actually influence decision-making. A staggering 48 percent of users want the video to reflect what they’re interested in. Imagine segmenting your audience and hitting it with targeted video ads that do exactly that. This is bound to bring back conversion.

The above sources show that video—either on its own or used in email marketing—is effective, provided that you know all of the fruitful ways to use it in an email and the reasons for using it.

But is your business ready for a marketing strategy that includes video marketing? Do you know how to build a video marketing strategy that will pay off? Gauge whether or not you’re ready by doing the following:

• Determining your goals: Doing this will help you pinpoint the exact type of marketing content—and more specifically the type of video—you need to come up with.
• Assessing your existing marketing efforts: Are your current marketing efforts up to par? Videos in email marketing might be gold, but maybe you need to obtain some silver first. Evaluate what you’re already doing to see if it’s time to add video to the mix.

Now, since you have an idea of how useful video can be when used in your general marketing campaigns, let’s go ahead and see how you can implement it in your email marketing campaigns.

Why You Should Use Video in Email Marketing

There are more than a couple of reasons why you should incorporate video in your email marketing strategy. Let’s look at what it can get you that a plain old email can’t:

1. Engagement

Engagement is one of the most important reasons for using video in your overall marketing strategy—and especially in your email marketing strategy. Video is one of a few things that can be beautiful, engaging, cost-effective, and sales-boosting at the same time. Humans rely on their vision more than any other sense to learn and comprehend things, and video marketing takes advantage of this.

Let’s assume that you need to boost your influencer marketing game. Your videos need to be relevant to that goal and short enough for the prospect to actually watch them.

By cutting up your content and the information you need your audience to know, and offering small, bite-sized pieces, you make it easier for them to digest all of the necessary information.

2. Open Communication

Videos can create the impression that there’s an open dialogue between the brand and the consumer. Creating, for example, a video showcasing the use of your product or the creative process behind it can make the prospect or the customer feel like they’re part of the creative process itself. And who doesn’t love to be included?

3. SEO

Another benefit of video marketing—and another reason to use it in your email marketing campaigns—is that videos can do wonders in terms of ranking on search engine results pages.

In other words, with some proper SEO magic, your email marketing campaign and your video in this email marketing campaign could go viral—something that won’t happen as easily with a text post, no matter how clever the copy.

Ways to Use Video in Email Marketing

You already know about SMART goals and how you need to study your KPIs before deciding on your marketing efforts. But I need to make sure you understand something very important before moving on:

Not all email providers support video. If your prospect doesn’t use a supporting email provider, all they’ll see is some fallback text, aka an ugly box with some text explaining why the feature is not working.

(Source)

Unless you don’t mind missing out on a great deal of conversion, don’t base your entire campaign off HTML5 (the markup language used to code videos into your emails). Instead, work with the following elements:

1. Use a GIF

One of the best video-in-email-marketing tactics is using an animated GIF. GIFs have been around for quite some time and are supported by pretty much every email client.

There are some email clients that don’t support GIFs, so the best thing to do is include all of the information the user needs on the first frame of your GIF. That way, they’ll be able to read about the special offers (if there are any), and they’ll be enticed to click on your CTA.

After that, if you’re pursuing lead generation, you can create a dedicated landing page with some great landing page copy and see your conversion skyrocket!

Pro tip: On your landing page, use the same GIF or something that could be coming after the GIF you used for your email marketing campaign.

2. Use a Play Button

This is one of the easiest ways to “embed” a video into your email marketing campaign and meld video marketing and email marketing together. It’s also one of the most rewarding, if you ask me.

The process is fairly simple: You get an image from the video in question, a screenshot, an actual thumbnail of the video—that’s totally your call—and then use it in your email marketing campaign. On that image, you’ll add a play button element, making the image look like a video that’s waiting to be played.

(Source)

You can click on that image or you can click on the “WATCH THE VIDEO” CTA—whatever you prefer. You’ll be redirected to the video.

Pro tip: Use autoplay on the landing page. It doesn’t make sense for the user to click on a play button twice. However, be mindful of the sound. It’s best for the video to be muted, just like the social media videos we bump into on various platforms.

3. Add an Actual Video to Your Email Marketing Campaign

You can always segment and study your data, check the email providers and devices each of your customers use, and in the end, weigh the pros and cons and use an actual video. If, for example, most of the users you need to target for your next email campaign use Apple Mail, go ahead and embed that video.

A word of warning, though: You may miss out on a lot more engagement, and there will be no need for a prospect to spend time on your website because they won’t be redirected there.

4. Put a Video in Your Email Marketing Signature

Yes, folks, this is a thing and, honestly, it’s interesting!

The setup process doesn’t differ from adding a static image and the play button to your email marketing campaign. You’ll just need a thumbnail, the play button, and the link for redirecting your prospects.

By adding a video of yourself to your email signature, you can make it seem like your prospects are talking to someone they may have met before. Plus, adding a tone of voice, facial expression, and that “close contact” feeling puts a face to a name.

This is a great way to engage prospects with cold emailing, especially if you use the word “video” in your subject line.

5. Create Video Marketing Testimonials

One of my favorite tactics that you can use to boost your business is customer testimonials.

Both in pure email marketing and in pure video marketing, testimonials can be goldmines for engagement, increased purchases, and helping people become brand ambassadors.

Now, imagine what could happen if you create a video email marketing campaign with testimonials. Testimonials can raise brand awareness with less words than an entire campaign would need.

The fact of the matter, of course, is that testimonial videos are not as cost-effective to create. But if budget is one of your primary concerns, a person talking about how your product made their lives easier—or, better yet, how your product made them into the person they wanted to be—will pay back in full.

6. Produce a Video Marketing Series

You want to tell the story of a person who came across your product and loved everything about it—so much so that they became a repeat customer, joined your customer loyalty program, and so on and so forth.

How are you going to tell their story if it’s well over the two-minute mark? By creating an email marketing campaign that splits the video into a series!

This will keep your audience on their toes, engage them, and even have them looking forward to your email. Not to mention that it’s a fantastic way to upsell and cross-sell products to your existing customers.

Use your data to segment and see who might be interested in the product in the video campaign you’re about to release and … voila! All the prospects interested in the campaign you’re planning will be right there and you’ll be ready to work your magic!

7. Get the Video Marketing Shares

One of the best things about video, like I mentioned earlier, is that it can go viral in seconds.

OK, seconds may be an overstatement, but you get the gist. A video can go viral easily, making a whole video marketing campaign or email marketing campaign go viral as well. Just make sure your content is shareable, either by making your email shareable or by sharing your content on your social media platforms for maximum engagement and exposure.

While you’re at it, think of incentivizing shares. For each share, you could give out a code for a small discount, free shipping, or exclusive insider news about your brand.

Social shares can get you more prospects without you doing anything other than setting up a landing page.

Video in Email Marketing: The Honorable Mentions

There are many more ways to use video in email marketing to get your prospects on board with your product:

• If you’re a SaaS company, you can use video in your email marketing campaigns to help with your users’ onboarding. Just set up the videos, your campaign, and a dedicated page, and you’ll be good to go.
• If you need to market a location—maybe you’re a tourist agency or maybe you’re a restaurant in that area—create a newsletter and include a video showcasing all of the fun activities a visitor can do there.
• If you’re selling a product, you can use video in email marketing campaigns to show your prospects how to use that product.

Is there an event you want to promote? Is there a PR crisis you want to avoid? Or maybe, just maybe, you need to create a digest to keep users on their toes?

There’s no better way than creating a video email marketing campaign that showcases how your brand loves its prospects and customers.

The Takeaway

Video in email marketing is beneficial.

Whether you need to create presentations that will give your customers inside information about your product or you need to promote online courses, you can go ahead and create videos to support those needs.

CONSHOHOCKEN, Pa.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–eLocal, a leading provider of performance-based advertising for local, regional and national service businesses, today announced they have reached agreement on principal terms to acquire Ring Router. The acquisition is expected to close in the immediate term.

Based in Pasadena, CA, Ring Router provides performance-based advertising in the form of pay-per-call programs within multiple insurance verticals. For years, Ring Router has helped large, national insurance agencies as well as independent local agents drive high intent, highly qualified insurance phone calls.

For more than 10 years, eLocal has offered a pay-per-call/pay-per-lead solution to businesses in the home services, legal, debt and addiction sectors. With the acquisition of Ring Router, eLocal will be able to deploy its best in class performance-based advertising solutions to insurance agencies nationwide. “We are excited to build upon Ring Router’s strong foundation within the insurance marketplace,” said Bruce Aronow, CEO at eLocal.

Fueled by an infusion of growth capital from LLR Partners in late 2017, eLocal is focused on augmenting its organic growth through targeted acquisitions in its existing and new verticals. “As we looked to expand our reach into new verticals, Ring Router quickly emerged as the right partner, with their similar performance-based pricing model and such a strong reputation in the insurance industry,” added Aronow.

“There was a natural fit between eLocal’s pay-per-call platform and what Ring Router has built,” said Brett Sweeney, head of business development at Ring Router who will lead eLocal’s new insurance division. “By leveraging eLocal’s technology and resources, I believe we have an incredible opportunity to accelerate the growth of the eLocal insurance division and deliver significant value to our clients and our publishing partners.”

About eLocal

eLocal is a fast-growing, 10-year-old performance-based advertising company, whose mission is to connect consumers with local businesses. With a specialization in the home services and legal verticals, eLocal has been at the forefront of a changing advertising industry as one of the only media companies offering businesses of all sizes a performance-based pricing model to support new customer acquisition. In 2016 and 2017, eLocal ranked in the Philadelphia Business Journal’s Soaring 76 for the fastest-growing companies in the region. Its founders also won EY Entrepreneur of the Year Awards in 2017 for E-Services. Learn more at www.elocal.com.

Many professionals focus on developing their hard skills in order to improve and advance their careers. While hard skills are important, organizations today are looking for professionals that possess strong soft skills. After all, even if you’re the best at coding, you won’t be able to advance your career if you don’t know how to work well with others.

In fact, Google did an internal study that found that among the eight most important qualities of their top employees, hard skills such as STEM expertise come in dead last. The seven top characteristics of success at Google are all soft skills like being a good coach, communicating and listening well, being a good critical thinker and being able to make connections across complex ideas, just to name a few.

If you want to grow professionally, get a promotion, or land a new job this year, here are four soft skills you need to possess.  

1. Creativity  

Creativity is one of the top soft skills employers are looking for. And creativity isn’t just important for professionals in graphic design and content marketing; creativity is beneficial in all roles within an organization, from human resources to software engineering to customer service. Creative people are able to develop new ideas and apply new solutions to address existing problems, which will allow businesses to discover new opportunities for innovation and growth.

Luckily, creativity isn’t only a skill that people are born with, you can actually learn to be more creative. There are a number of ways to boost your creativity like collaborating with others, asking for feedback, writing down your ideas, solving a puzzle or even going to an escape room. 

2. Social intelligence 

Being “street smart” is just as important as being “book smart” in the workforce. Social intelligence, commonly referred to as street smarts, is the ability to get along with others, build relationships and navigate social environments. As you can imagine, social intelligence is necessary if you want to build meaningful and successful relationships with people in an organization.

What exactly is social intelligence? According to Psychology Today, the key elements of social intelligence include:

Verbal fluency and conversational skills

Knowledge of social roles, rules, and scripts

Effective listening skills

Understanding what makes other people tick

Role-playing and social self-efficacy

Social intelligence can be developed from experiences with people and learning from your successes and failures in social situations. So, a great way to boost these skills is by getting out there and interacting with people. For example, you can attend networking events to practice your conversational and listening skills. Remember, study the behaviors of others and yourself to master social intelligence. 

3. Digital literacy

Gone are the days when knowing how to use Microsoft Office Suite was enough to land a job. Today, technology has taken over the workplace and it’s constantly evolving, which makes digital literacy an essential soft skill to have in 2020 and beyond. The American Library Association (ALA) defines digital literacy as “the ability to use information and communication technologies to find, evaluate, create and communicate information, requiring both cognitive and technical skills.” In simpler terms, digital literacy involves knowing how to use digital tools effectively in order to solve problems, be productive, work collaboratively, create content, etc.

You can develop your own digital literacy skills by doing a little research online. Read articles or take online courses about the basics like online safety, email etiquette and creating slideshow presentations, for instance. Then, you can begin to learn more about advanced computer and tech skills like email marketing or basic coding. Be sure to take advantage of any learning opportunities provided by your employer as well. 

4. Virtual collaboration 

Remote work is on the rise. According to GlobalWorkplaceAnalytics.com, regular work-at-home, among the non-self-employed population, has grown by 173 percent since 2005. That’s 11 percent faster than the rest of the workforce and nearly 47x faster than the self-employed population. So, whether you’re working remotely yourself or you’ll be working with other remote team members within a company, virtual collaboration skills are necessary for today’s workforce.

Virtual collaboration is the method of collaboration between team members regardless of their location that is carried out via digital tools. To boost your virtual collaboration skills, familiarize yourself with popular virtual collaboration tools like video conferencing software, time tracking tools, project management software, instant messaging tools and so on. It’s also important to increase your cross-cultural awareness. Remote companies typically have international teams so you need to be able to effectively interact and work with team members of various cultural backgrounds. 

Over to you!

These are just a few of the top soft skills employers are looking for. Start developing and mastering these important soft skills to get a leg up on the competition. With your new and improved soft skills, you can take your career to the next level.

Insight:

Google’s findings suggest that mobile marketers need to create branded content for YouTube that provides helpful information for target audiences or to collaborate with influencers who have gained a following by sharing their expertise about a topic. While many viewers watch YouTube to be entertained, they also turn to the video platform for educational purposes including their personal interests and passions. That motivation helps to explain the growth of the social influencer industry, with two-thirds of marketers planning to boost their influencer budgets in the next year, per a separate study by CreatorIQ and Influencer Marketing Hub.

Google is publishing its findings as TV networks and digital media companies prepare for the upfront sales season, which this year is being disrupted by coronavirus concerns. Marketers have significantly boosted their spending on digital video as viewers migrate from linear TV to other content platforms including YouTube. Programmatic video ad spending in the U.S. was forecast to rise 20% to $34.9 billion this year from 2019, eMarketer estimated last year. A separate study by the Interactive Advertising Bureau found that the average advertiser participating in last year’s NewFronts upfront marketplace for digital video planned to boost spending 25% to $18 million.

YouTube is touting is reach among audiences as the video platform becomes a significant source of advertising sales for Alphabet, the umbrella company that oversees Google and YouTube. Last month, Alphabet reported YouTube’s 2019 revenue rose 36% to $15.1 billion from a year earlier, outpacing the 15% gain for Google’s search ad revenue. Google’s total ad revenue including YouTube and its digital ad network increased 17% to $37.9 billion from a year earlier, matching the 17% pace of the prior quarter.