Business Marketing
Startup launches TRIPress – WordPress framework for real estate pros
Business Marketing
Cooler temps mean restaurants have to get creative to survive
(MARKETING) With winter approaching, restaurants are starting to find creative and sustainable ways to keep customers coming in… and warm.
Business Marketing
Canva is catching on to content trends, launches in-app video editor
(MARKETING) Canva launches an in-platform video editor, allowing access to their extensive library of assets and animations to create high-quality videos
Video content consumption is on the rise, and the graphic design platform, Canva, took note of it. The $40 billion Australian startup has entered the video business and announced the launch of its video editor, Canva Video Suite.
The end-to-end video editor is an easy-to-use platform that anyone, no matter the skill level, can create, edit, and record high-quality videos. Best of all, it’s free, and it’s available on both desktop and mobile platforms.
The tool has hundreds of editable templates that you can use to create videos for several online platforms like TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook. Some templates can be used to create workplace and business videos, while other templates are perfect for personal videos. There are playful themes you can use to create that spooky video just in time for Halloween or make a laugh-out-loud video to send to your best friend! With a wide range of selections, in no time you’ll start creating your very own video masterpiece with Canva.
What else does the video software offer and what can you do with it? Well, let me tell you:
Collaborate in real-time
Having everyone on the same page is important and Canva’s video suite takes that into account. To collaborate with others, you simply send them an invite, and together you can edit videos, manage assets, and leave comments to give your input.
Video timeline editing and in-app recording
Similar to building presentation slides, Canva’s scene-based editor simplifies video editing by using a timeline approach. With it, you can quickly reorder, crop, trim, and splice your videos. Also, users don’t need to leave the platform to record that last-minute shot; within the app, you can shoot and record yourself from a camera or a screen.
Library of assets
The video editor is filled with an array of watermark-free stock footage, icons, images, illustrations, and even audio tracks that you can choose from – but if you really need something that is not on their platform – you can upload your own image, video, or audio track.
Animate with ease
Although still in the process of being released, soon you will be able to add animations of both text and visual elements in just a few simple clicks. Among others, animation presets that fade, pan, and tumble will help you transform your video and take it to a whole other level.
Overall, Canva Video Suite is very intuitive and has all the essential things you need to create a video. And by streamlining the video creation process, Canva is ensuring it enters the video marketplace with a bang.
“One of Canva’s guiding principles is to make complex things simple, and our new Video Suite will allow everyone to unlock the power of video, whether that’s to market their business, make engaging social posts, or express their creativity,” said Rob Kawalsky, Head of Product at Canva.
Business Marketing
Amazon attracts advertisers from Facebook after Apple privacy alterations
(MARKETING) After Apple’s privacy features unveil, Amazon adapts by taking a unique approach to targeting, disrupting revenue for the ad giant Facebook.
As a de facto search engine of its own persuasion, Amazon has been poaching ad revenue from Google for some time. However, disrupting the revenue stream from their most recent victim – Facebook – is going to turn some heads.
According to Bloomberg, Apple’s recent privacy additions to products such as iPhones are largely responsible for the shift in ad spending. While platforms like Facebook and Instagram were originally goldmines for advertisers, these privacy features prevent tracking for targeting – a crucial aspect in any marketing campaign.
Internet privacy has been featured heavily in tech conversations for the last several years, and with Chrome phasing out third-party cookies, along with Safari and Firefox introducing roughly analogous policies, social media advertising is bound to become less useful as tracking strategies struggle to keep up with the aforementioned changes.
However, Amazon’s wide user base and separate categorization from social media companies makes it a clear alternative to the Facebook family, which is perhaps why Facebook advertisers are starting to jump ship in an effort to preserve their profits.
This is the premise behind the decision to reduce the Facebook ad spending of Vanity Planet by 22%, a home spa vendor, while facilitating a transition to Amazon. “We have inventory…and the biggest place we are growing is Amazon,” says Alex Dastmalchi, the entrepreneur who runs Vanity Planet.
That gap will only widen with Apple’s new privacy features. Bloomberg reports that when asked in June if they would consent to having their internet activity tracked, only one in four iPhone users did so; this makes it substantially harder for the ad campaigns unique to Facebook to target prospective buyers.
It also means that Amazon, having demonstrated a profound effectiveness in targeting individuals both pre- and post-purchase, stands to gain more than its fair share of sellers flocking to promote their products.
Jens Nicolaysen, co-founder of Shinesty (an eccentric underwear company), affirms the value that Amazon holds for sellers while acknowledging that it isn’t a perfect substitute for social media. While Nicolaysen laments the loss of the somewhat random introduction charm inherent on Instagram, he also believes in the power of brand loyalty, especially on a platform as high-profile as Amazon. “The bigger you are, the more you lose by not having any presence on Amazon,” he explains.
As privacy restrictions continue to ramp up in the coming months, it will be interesting to see how social media advertising evolves to keep up with this trend; it seems naive to assume that Amazon will replace Facebook’s ads entirely, tracking or no tracking.
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Roland Estrada
December 14, 2011 at 11:09 am
Technological advances are great and always appreciated on the backend. However, someone needs to fill the niche of designing attractive, modern looking websites for agents. You can spot a real estate website a mile away. You know the look. Because we all have that look – boring, dull and predictable.
If someone could come up with a way to let agents design WYSIWYG sites like Ryan McCann's site with all the tech goodness on the backend… Gold baby! Gold!
https://www.ryansellsedmonton.com/index.php
TheRECoach
December 14, 2011 at 9:08 pm
Eric, help us understand what differentiates this product from using Diverse Solutions IDX on a WordPress.org Blog, with the Agent Press Theme? Diverse Solutions is $29 (or maybe you go crazy with the mapping product for $89 a month) a month and Agent Press with SEO support and a helpdesk is a one time fee of $98.
What's really better and why?
Thanks
Coach
Eric Stegemann
December 15, 2011 at 4:47 pm
Eric
Great question.
There are many HUGE differences.
1) Diverse Solutions does not offer a fully functional CRM system. Our system keeps track of all of the users that register on your site. You can automatically start them on drip email campaigns, send out a newsletter to everyone that has registered and a whole lot more.
2) You mention SEO support, however, I would challenge anyone to beat the SEO that we produce on these sites. They have been written from the ground up for top placement. As an example, the site referenced in the story had about 3000 pages indexed for his market when we took over the site, now it has 11,400! In addition to that in just a few weeks, Tony's Google placement is already moving up. Instead of focusing on what we can sell for 98 a pop, at Tribus we really focused on what RESULTS we could produce for our agents that would speak for themselves. Even the smallest detail has been considered in the code.
Furthermore, we setup a SEO strategy for each site to get optimal ranking. On top of this we setup our system to ping Google each time new listings are added in one of our Realtor's key markets. This helps them get top placement in Google since Google knows that our sites always have the freshest content.
Along with SEO is hosting. Our sites are professionally managed by a team of server specialists to be served as quick as possible. Did you know Google is starting to rank sites based upon how fast they load? If it's over 1.5seconds you could receive lower rankings! Not to mention that our sites are secured. We fix it for you if there are any problems.
3) TRIpress is written by Realtors for Realtors. We've made it significantly easier to setup communities, listings, and more. Our code then automatically pulls in listings in the area, the map, community information and news and a whole lot more!
4) Speaking directly to Diverse. We do work with Diverse and that's why our product is similar to theirs. They offer an amazing product and instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, we choose to work with them to build a suite of new tools on top of their product to make it even better. For example, TRIpress has pop up registration forms. You can't get that on IDXpress. This feature alone should increase lead volume 100s of %. Never asking a user to register for the site is akin to opening up a website that says I'm giving free money away, here take some. We suggest that Realtors don't FORCE their users to register but instead politely ask them after 3-5 listing views.
Furthmore, on top of that we have amazing call to action buttons on our listings, the call to action buttons we have studied and tested to get more requests. We have contextual information about the house for example a map, shopping, schools and other information that many users would want to know about the area. There are even other things that we're working on that I can't even discuss!
5) Altos Market Data – You could go and sign up with Altos and manually build pages for each market you have, however we worked directly with Altos to build the most sophisticated, search engine optimized market data platform out there. There is a reason Altos uses our sites as a demo when showing off their products! When you sign up you have a page automatically created for each market you serve that is beautiful, has numerous calls to action, not to mention the contextual listings and community information included right on the page, helping your site rank higher for those communities!
6) Simplification – Even if a Realtor could get all of our features from a few companies out there. I don't think this is what they want. Realtors are too busy to do setup, management, hosting, and all of that. They want something that just works and is simple for them to use. We've focused on providing a near turn key solution for them. And if you include one of our optional upgrades Posted@ you even get unique, custom, SEO optimized content on your site regularly. TRIpress is a product for serious Realtors that want something they can be proud of that generates them leads and just works.
So with AgentPress or something like that you spend countless hours figuring out how to set it up, signing up for all of these third party services, figuring out how to integrate them with your site, and then in most cases seeing little to no increase in rankings. With ours – we do all of that for you plus we'll be adding more features all of the time at no additional cost! There are other reasons as well, but I hope you see just with the 6 items I listed above that our cost is MORE than worth the price we charge.
TheRECoach
December 15, 2011 at 10:10 pm
Any chance you can "Elaborate" any further!? lol, just kidding … Thanks for the great answer and for the record, I LOVE Posted@, I think it's a biz model long overdue, and at this point, under utilized because of the economy. They (posted@) may be the "Gold Medal" standard for content creation!
Best of luck with this new venture!
Coach
(do you think people will catch on that we know each other? lol you called me Eric!)
TheRECoach
December 16, 2011 at 1:16 pm
Yo "E", one more question .. Statistics indicate that less than 2% of CRM users utilize the additional tools (beyond Client Info)available in most CRMs. Yours has a ton of amazing stuff, how are you gonna get them to understand that, and use those tools?
Coach
Eric Stegemann
December 16, 2011 at 1:49 pm
Well first of all, all of our agents receive a 40 page quick reference guide with photos on each page of how to do exactly everything our system can do. We found this increased uptake immensely. In addition to that, we offer our helpdesk system which has a video for everything in the system as well as bunch of other questions that people ask.
But the biggest reason we see people use the system is because it's where they get their leads. Because thy are all stored in our system agents use it because they want to see what people were interested in and keep a log of communications with the client as well as set reminders to do call backs, send birthday emails, etc.