ideo marketing is a hit. According to Oberlo, 87% of marketing professionals use video as a marketing tool. So, if you don’t implement video content in your marketing campaigns, you’re definitely missing out.

Essentially, video marketing is a component of an integrated marketing plan, aimed to increase audience engagement and boost social activity, mostly through social media. The strategy is built around one video or a series of videos that are connected to a particular product and are characteristic of the company’s values.

Why is video marketing on the rise, when there are so much other different content types that are as engaging? What makes it stand out? Take a look at these stats:

• According to Renderforest, 5 billion videos are watched on YouTube on a daily basis
• According to the same source, 70% of marketers claim that videos convert better than any other type of content
• Optinmonster supports these numbers, adding that 94% of businesses are using video as an effective marketing tool, and 81% of the surveyed businesses saw an increase in sales. Moreover, 53% of businesses saw a decrease in customer support issues after using explainer videos in their marketing campaigns

Social Data and Video Marketing

Today, not a single marketing campaign can be launched without social media, not only because social media give brands extra exposure, but also because they provide brands with social data to help them keep up with the KPIs.

Although mining social data is a pretty down-to-earth process, with tools like Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics making it possible, confusion may hit you when you actually try to use it for your video marketing campaign.

So, here are some insights on how to use social data to launch a successful video marketing campaign.

1. Study Your Audience for Better Targeting

Knowing your target audience is crucial, and your future video marketing campaign is no exception. But audience analysis is also an important part of video production and plays an important role in creating a video script.

Another reason why you should pay close attention to audience analysis in your video marketing campaign is delivering the right message to the right people, especially if you’re a newborn brand. According to Social Bakers, this type of content is used primarily in the early stage of a marketing campaign, when customers are only learning about your brand.

Audience analysis is a multifaceted process that involves the discussion of crucial points that will influence the nature of your marketing videos. This process involves the analysis of the following aspects:

These aspects describe one audience persona that will characterize the whole target audience that you will address in your video. The more detailed this description is, the more targeted marketing video you’ll create because you’ll know exactly who you want to reach with your video message.

So, for better targeting and for a more detailed marketing video, make sure that you have a proper audience analysis.

2. Explore Likes, Shares, and Comments for Content Ideas

If you choose to launch your video marketing campaign on one of the social media platforms, social data that describes the performance of your previous posts, as well as the data, collected from likes, and shares, will help you determine which platform will work the best for your marketing needs and which content your followers from each platform prefer better.

For instance, if your Facebook account stats show that posts with videos on your page are the most active, like here,

you can consider your Facebook account as the main platform for your video marketing campaign.

Activity on your posts, including comments, likes and shares, is the source of unique metrics, mined from social media platforms. They give you important information on what your existing social media audience likes and wants to see, and you can use it in your video marketing campaign. Social data that can be mined from them, can give a serious boost to your creativity, providing you with plenty of content ideas. Here’s how you can use them.

• Likes and Shares

This is an indirect form of feedback from your social media followers. This way they express their perception of the content you’re posting, so listen closely. The more likes a post gets, the more clues you receive as for what your audience wants to see, and you can later implement these ideas during the video production process.

The analysis of likes and shares is a generator of engaging topics for your marketing videos. For instance, the international real estate company Flatfysaw an increased interest in posts about real estate statistics on their Instagram account. So, that’s how they came up with an idea for a marketing video, covering the global population and the future of the real estate search.

• Comments

Your followers may express their feedback using the comment section under your posts. Comments are a great way to find out who watches your content and make necessary adjustments to your video marketing campaign.

For instance, one comment in Spanish under a “What is inbound marketing?” video inspired us to create a whole video in Spanish:

Such comments give you the idea about not only what your audience needs but who they are as well. So, watch comments closely to find inspiration for your marketing videos. They are a great source of valuable social data.

3. Perform Competitor Analysis

By taking a look at your competitors, you obtain their social data for your benefit. Analyze, how their marketing videos performing to learn from their mistakes and benefit from their wins as well.

According to Statista, competitor analysis includes the following essential steps:

• Identifying relevant competitors in a specified market segment
• Describing key data concerning the competitors that you’ve picked
• Analyzing the business strategies of each competitor. In our case, you take all video marketing campaigns of each of your competitors and analyze their performance. You can use SWOT analysis to obtain the full scope of data
• Studying their corporate philosophy and making a comparison to your brand’s values
• Based on their behaviours and marketing strategies, you can establish your immediate goals

Including competitor analysis into your video marketing campaign is an important step to be taken before you even launch the production of the video itself. Competitor analysis can give you important clues and ideas for creating a video script, as well as the knowledge of the things you will need to avoid.

Your primary goal is to create a marketing video that stands out, thus, competitor analysis will help you understand, which characteristic features of your brand you want to emphasize.

4. Keep Track of Your KPIs

Lastly, valuable social data can be obtained from your own KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). Take a look at your previous video marketing campaigns. How did they perform? What were their advantages? What were the drawbacks? How can they be fixed

By answering these and other possible related questions will help you figure out what should be included in your next video marketing campaign. When you launch it, keeping track of the KPIs will be the task that you’ll have to do on a regular basis to make sure that your video marketing campaign performs well.

Conclusion

Opting for a video marketing campaign is surely the right decision, and social data will help you make it right. Correctly applied social data will help you understand exactly who you want to target with your video marketing campaign. It will also give you important hints on what your followers want to see and even provide you with ideas for your marketing videos. Social data, mined from competitor analysis and your previous KPIs, will give you the knowledge of what you want to highlight and what should be avoided in your next video marketing campaign to make it successful.

Hopefully, these tips will help you figure out how to use immense amounts of valuable data you’ll get from social media in order to create a successful video marketing campaign.

Everything starts small and then grows big, even businesses. By definition, a small business is a business that is owned independently and is limited in terms of size and revenue generated. For instance, a cake shop or a web design agency with an employee size of 10-12 can be said to be a small business. Furthermore, the upper limit to the employee count is 500. Thus, if your business falls under the bracket of 1 – 500 employees you are a small business.

Moving on, irrespective of your business size in today’s competitive online trending world having a social presence is a must. Be it a Facebook business page, Twitter or Instagram to engage more users and reach a wider audience base, however, a business website is also a must and shouldn’t be overlooked.

In this article, we’ll be covering the importance of a business website and the best hosting for small business websites. So let us begin!

Importance of a website

If we were to say, having a business website adds to a business’s credibility, wouldn’t you agree? You most likely would! In fact, it is easier to browse through a website listed on Google as it is more detailed along with your YouTube, Facebook Marketplace or Instagram.

In fact, according to a report, 97% of consumers use the internet to find local businesses, whereas, another finding says, only 64% of small businesses have their own website. If we are to go by the results of these two findings, we can conclude the importance of having a business website. Chances are 64% of businesses will perform better than you in gaining an audience and broadening their outreach. Retaining the customer, however, is a secondary thing.

Let us see the top 4 reasons why having a business website is important:

1. Your website shows up in the local internet search results, resulting in more people to know about your existence.
2. You can leverage your digital marketing strategy by running dedicated campaigns on social media and linking back to your website for more in-depth information.
3. You can collect customer information by asking them to subscribe and keep in touch with them on a timely basis with the right email marketing.
4. Content is king, and you can use it to sell products to your customers by attracting them with the right words and information. Your website is like a one-stop-shop for customers looking for a dedicated product, albeit, a virtual one. Thriftbooks, an online bookstore is one example of a website that is a virtual bookstore and has steadily grown over the years.

Now, that we’ve seen the importance of a website for your small business. Let us move on to tackle the next big thing, the backend of your website. You may wonder, why the backend? However, you must know the technicalities while running your website.

Things to look out in web hosting

Imagine you finally decide to set up your website and are launching it at 11 AM local time. The invites have been mailed, the social media poster launched and bang as the clock strikes 11, your current and potential future customers click on the much-awaited link! However, to their surprise and your utter horror, the website is down because the server you hosted on crashed due to or your website loads slowly because of so much traffic. And if this is a recurring issue, instead of your website helping you gain more customers it will end up making you lose more customers. Tragic, isn’t it? Calm down, it isn’t tragic, the right web hosting can help you avoid this problem, however, what is the right web hosting?

When it comes to web hosting solutions for a small business there is always a doubt which is the best hosting for small businesses? Before tackling that question, let us first understand what are the things that you need to look out for in web hosting.

1. Managed Servers 
   Being a small business you will have a limited number of employees to manage your business and marketing activities. Along with that if you were told that you even need to manage the technical aspect of running your website, it might complicate matters. Web hosting that provides managed services is simple and helps take care of your business website by maintaining it, upgrading the software, managing the security, backup and much more so that you can concentrate on running your business without worrying about the website. Our Advantage: We offer managed hosting services that are simple and secure along with an easy intuitive dashboard, cPanel, for free to help you navigate through your orders easily. This means you can take care of running your business while we take care of the website management.
2. Website loading speed 
   Website loading speed is an important factor when it comes to how your customers feel about your website. According to a survey, 40% of users abandon a site if it takes 3 mins to load. To make sure your website visitors don’t get the same experience which, in turn, can hamper your performance make sure to choose a web hosting service that offers good load speed. Our Advantage: Our web hosting services, especially Cloud Hosting comes with varnish cache and ZFS storage. Varnish cache helps in boosting your website speed by 1000x that means, blazing fast website load speed, while, ZFS ensures there is no single point of failure!
3. Support 
   System admin support is very important in case you are stuck with something and don’t know how to proceed further. A good web hosting service provider will always offer 24/7 website support. Our Advantage: We offer round-the-clock expert website support to resolve any of your technical queries to provide uninterrupted services.
4. Resource upgradation 
   Today you are a small business, tomorrow your performance may multiple and you will outgrow your hosting resources. At this time, it is important that your hosting provider offers resources upgradation like RAM, CPU, etc.to accommodate your growing traffic. Our Advantages: Our hosting plans are easily scalable. We offer easy single click upgradation of hosting resources like RAM, OS and CPU with our Cloud Hosting.

Best web hosting for small business

Having seen what are the things that your chosen web hosting should have it is time to figure out which web hosting is best for small businesses?

There are several web hosting options available, however, one that we would recommend to small businesses is Cloud Hosting. In Cloud hosting your website data is stored across multiple devices, which improves redundancy and website load time. Moreover, it offers all the above features, along with, data mirroring, several 1-click application installations like WordPress, Joomla, etc. an intuitive panel to monitor your resources and much more. Above all reliability is of utmost importance and Cloud Hosting promises that and we believe it is the best hosting for small business.

We hope this article helped you in understanding the importance of having your own business website, as well as, choosing the web hosting solutions for your small business. If you have any queries or comments, feel free to leave them in the comments section below.

Running an online e-commerce business takes a lot of strategizing and planning. Right from setting up your website, to selecting the right web hosting, and most importantly choosing a payment gateway for your store. To make your work easier we have compiled a list of the 5 best online payment gateways in 2019.

Do Payment Gateways Affect your Business?

Choosing the right payment gateway is crucial when it comes to the success of your e-commerce store. Payment gateways are like a bridge between the buyer and seller. They permit fund transfer directly to the seller, keeping the security and comfort of the buyer in mind.

As per a survey by Baymard Institute, 6% of the customers abandoned their cart because there weren’t enough payment methods available. Added to this, most users these days prefer mobile payment options as they are quick and effortless. Thus, it is imperative that you choose a payment gateway keeping these points in mind:

• Secure
• Well-known
• Easy to use

Let us have a look at the top 5 online payment gateways to look forward to in 2019.

1. PayPal
   PayPal is a global online payments platform that assists in online money transfer. It currently has over 277 million users worldwide and operates in 202 markets. Moreover, PayPal allows customers to send, receive, & hold funds in 25 currencies worldwide. One of the advantages of PayPal is that you need not have a PayPal account for processing payment. This is a great advantage of e-commerce stores as they need not worry if their customer has a PayPal account or not. Key Features of PayPal:
   1. Doesn’t require users to have a PayPal account to process payment
   2. Supports international payment and credit card
   3. Multi-currency support
   4. No withdrawal fee
   5. Fast mobile payment
2. PayU 
   PayU is a prominent online payment service provider that processes payments faster for both merchants and buyers. PayU covers 18 markets across Asia, Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Latin America and Africa catering to over 2.3 billion consumers. They have over 300 payment methods for fast, simple and secure electronic payments across platforms. It supports one-click buy that allows users to purchase with a single click, thus improving customer conversion rates on your e-commerce website. Key Features of PayU:
   1. Easily integrate and receive all local payment methods instantly
   2. Supports one-click buy allowing users to purchase with a single click
   3. Mobile integration
   4. Web checkout
   5. Multi-currency support
3. Amazon Payments
   Amazon Payments is a payment service offered by the e-commerce giant Amazon. The payment gateway is available to Amazon users both sellers and buyers to help smoothen their online purchase process. In Amazon Pay, the merchants can accept payment either online or on mobile. Moreover, it easily allows users to access their information from the merchant’s site so you don’t need to add any details like name, shipping address, credit card details etc. without compromising the security. This smoothens and fastens the payment process. Key Features of Amazon Payments:
   1. Has a faster checkout process
   2. Offers top-notch security
   3. There is a merchant website integration
   4. Supports automatic payments
   5. Fraud protection
4. Braintree
   Braintree is an online payment gateway and a division of PayPal designed to make your payment process simpler. Braintree supports over 45 countries and 130+ currencies worldwide. One of the benefits for Braintree is that users can tailor their checkout flows any way they would like while remaining PCI compliant. Moreover, it saves your customers the time and hassle of re-entering their payment information every time they make a purchase. Key Features of Braintree:
   1. Merchants can customize their checkout workflow
   2. Easy data migration
   3. Dynamic control panel
   4. Easy and Faster repeat billing
   5. Advanced fraud protection
5. Authorize.Net
   Authorize.Net is a payment gateway platform powering over 3+ lakh customers. It provides security and complex infrastructure to enable fast, secure and reliable data transfer. It offers plenty of options to its users for both accepting and processing payments. It offers an online payment system, as well as, at retail locations. The online payment system accepts credit cards and electronic cheques from websites and deposits the money directly to the merchant account. Key Features of Authorize.Net
   1. It supports multiple payment options viz. Mobile, retail, mail and phone payment
   2. It employs advanced Fraud Detection Suite
   3. It supports recurring billing
   4. It does not have a fixed enterprise pricing scheme
   5. It supports sync for Quickbooks

Conclusion:

We at UnifyHOST, use PayPal (USD, EURO) and Paytm (INR) payment gateways as we have a presence in India, however, as an e-commerce store owner you need to figure out which is the best online payment gateway option for you. It might be one amongst our top 5 list or any other payment gateway. The right choice is the one that is the most beneficial to your customers. Satisfied customers equal to increased and improved conversions which, in turn, leads to improved business.

Which is the online payment gateway used by you? Is it one amongst these or something else? Tell us in the comments section below.

Have you thought about how you can increase your brand loyalty? There are many ways to do that but m-commerce is one of the best ways.

M-Commerce, that is, selling on mobile devices, is an absolute must for any business. According to Statista, by the year 2021, almost 54% of all online transactions takeplace by Mobile retail Commerce (M-commerce) as opposed to the traditional E-Commerce platforms. And that is logical too, after all, mobile devices are by definition more convenient. Added to that fact is the situation that Google, is now employing a mobile-first rule, meaning that its rankings will prioritize mobile-friendly sites above everything else. So, if more than half of your potential market is mobile-based, and Google no less is ranking sites by their mobile accessibility, these are two very good reasons to start developing a brand loyalty strategy via M-Commerce.

1. Keep it simple

Mobile platforms don’t need bells and whistles. In fact, those same decorative elements actually end up having a detrimental effect by sending potential customers elsewhere due to over-complicated and messy pages. Keep your message clear and concise, and allow the customer to do what they want to do easily and simply. Anything extra is just overkill. Take a look at the AcademicBrits website and see how they handled a lot of information but added simplicity as well.

2. Quickly reveal value

We live in an impatient society, that’s a fact, and online it’s even more cutthroat. Just like in the previous point, get straight to the point and reveal instantly what value you can add to the customer. Don’t hide away terms and conditions, lay them bare, so the customer knows exactly what they are getting involved in, and allow them to take the plunge quickly. As for rewards, don’t make customers work too hard for them. Keep them within easy reach. If you don’t do it, someone else will, and there goes your customer.

3. Make your site customizable

Another challenge for developers is that, as well as being simple, a mobile site must also be customizable. After all, no one wants a site that provides a host of unnecessary information and/or products. This is all part of a society that demands instant gratification, so allow your site to be customized in a way that it only displays the content that the user wants. It should be responsive for mobile devices, obviously. Make sure it loads quickly and that it provides a great user experience that feels seamless and effortless.

4. Provide memorable user experience

Quite simply, nothing is really enough if you can’t produce some sort of emotional attachment to the user. Nowadays, people want imaginative and relatable experiences from the mobile sites they visit, and big data is not enough. To stand out from the crowd, you need unique experiences and content.

“What we are talking about here is the term ‘big emotions’. This means that nothing else will do, and this is a huge challenge for developers and marketers. How can you create an emotional connection with your customer?” asks Sindy Peltier, a tech editor at 1day2Write and Writemyx.

Customers are looking for an experience that provides a ‘wow’ factor that very first time. Once you have that first memorable user experience safely tucked into your belt, the next time becomes that little bit easier.

5. Engage the Audience

A huge part of building a brand relationship is engaging the customer in the first place. That can be through any number of methods, but you have to maintain the conversation and show that you genuinely listen by taking feedback at every opportunity and using it. Meaningful engagements can be secured through the site itself, or through social media channels. Thus, you need to ensure that your communication quickly becomes an engagement.

“Personalize that communication. In the past that used to be incredibly time consuming, but now automation software makes this a very accessible technique. It helps to develop an individual relationship which can be invaluable to a growing brand,” argues Lyndsay Stephens, an M-Commerce expert at Britstudent and Nextcoursework.

6. Use brand partnerships

Utilizing a well-considered brand partnership is a really smart way of developing your reputation and quickly securing a loyal following. Not only is it an extremely financially viable technique of growing exposure by piggy-backing onto the already established marketing presence of another brand, by selecting the right brands to get involved with, it shows the customer that you are looking out for them by bringing together two (or more) products or services that you understand they are seeking. It increases convenience, and aligned together with reward schemes, can actually result in infinitely better customer experience with meaningful savings and perks. That is a sure-fire way of building a relationship to last.

In summary

The stats don’t lie. Mobile platforms are the present and the future of E-Commerce transactions, particularly with the increasingly creative ways of making payments and accessing information. Creating a mobile-friendly platform is therefore not just smart, it is essential when growing brand loyalty and seeking to increase the number of active engagements and conversations. Follow these simple steps to achieving a brand strategy that takes your business to new heights.

It’s becoming more common to hear about IoT security – or the lack thereof – in the news, and computers and IoT devices are frequently targeted by hackers for “bot” employment to perform distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, application exploits and credential stuffing.

Non human traffic or bot traffic represents currently more than 60% of the total traffic going to web sites.

Those bots come in a variety of forms, making it extremely important to distinguish between the infected hosts that often make up botnets to perform various malicious activities, to the legitimate bots that are extremely important in driving customer traffic to your site (Googlebot, for example).

Different Types of Bot Attacks on Web Services

Websites that contain pricing information and proprietary information are especially vulnerable to bot traffic.

An example of a content scraping process can be seen when airline companies use bot farming to scrape price information from competitive airline company sites. They use this information to dynamically price similar products — once they find out what a competitor is charging, they can price their services lower to gain a market advantage.

A more malicious use includes deploying a botnet that seeks out vulnerabilities in website technology and stores this as a vulnerable site, ripe for exploitation.

Bots are a Growing Crisis

In the past, bot attacks weren’t nearly as sophisticated and powerful as they are now. During the mid-1990s, for example, the typical attack consisted of 150 requests per second. At the time, this was enough to bring down numerous systems. Now, due to the sheer size of modern botnets, the average attack generates over 7,000 requests per second.

Last year, we all witnessed many large scale attacks such as the DDoS attack against Oracle DYN, formerly Dyn DNS, which was hit with a flood of DNS queries from tens of millions of IP addresses at once. This was an attack executed by the Mirai botnet, which infected over 100,000 IoT devices and targeted tech giants like Netflix, Amazon, Spotify, Tumblr, Twitter, Reddit and OVH.

Because bot attacks are becoming more common (and dangerous), it’s crucial that every IT professional take proactive measures to combat malicious bot activities. Here are a few tips that can help in the fight against bots:

1. Separate the Bad Bots From the Good Bots

Bots are often lumped together into one big group, but there are good bots and there are bad bots. The bad ones are likely to attack your website and cause harm, but the good ones — like Googlebot — help make the internet a safer, more efficient place.

For that reason, you can’t simply block all bots in hopes of avoiding an attack. Instead, you need to categorize and allow good bots, whilst limiting and managing the bad ones.

Commonly a captcha is used to address basic bot attacks. As this requires “human” interaction to process it is seen as a good starting point. However, captchas are also seen as an inconvenient blocker in a user’s site experience.

2. Take Advantage of the Latest Technology in Security

Traditional rate limiting and captcha is no longer enough on its own and many companies have introduced Javascript challenges to establish the legitimacy of the origin of the request.

Using behavioural analysis of incoming requests combined with device fingerprinting enables companies to distinguish between infected hosts, whilst acting transparently and not impacting the browsing experience.

Leaseweb distributed cloud security platforms can cope with large volumes of traffic, connections, further protecting yourself from bot attacks.

3. Utilize Artificial Intelligence

It’s only a matter of time before attackers learn more sophisticated manners to collect data and replicate real user behavior more accurately. For this reason, numerous companies are trying to employ machine learning models to detect patterns and anomalies.

Leaseweb use models that work to inspect data at a rate not humanly possible, while simultaneously developing more sophisticated models to combat the endlessly changing bot technologies.

As a conclusion, our advice is that companies need to take proactive steps to actively stop malicious bots without compromising the availability of their web assets. Leveraging behavioral controls rather than static rules is far more effective as we work to control the rise of the bots.