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STAMFORD — Three years ago, Cheryl Henchar earned Rookie of the Year honors; now she is an all-star.

Henchar is not dominating on the court, but she has scored a string of successes since launching her Cheryl’s Creative Services marketing firm in 2013 after making a mid-career change. The 2016 Solution Provider All-Star accolade she received last month from the online marketing company Constant Contact recognized the effectiveness of campaigns she created for a group of clients with Constant Contact’s email platform and other online tools.

“Constant Contact is very user-friendly,” Henchar said in an interview. “It’s just a matter of somebody sitting down and training you about how to use it properly.”

The complexities of creating a digital marketing campaign can be overwhelming. Effective outreach requires consistently high numbers of clients opening emails and the links they contain and then using that engagement to build a growing customer base. Marketers also need to know when and how often to send email newsletters, which clients to target in their initiatives and how to tap into the potential of video, social media and data analytics.

That is where Henchar comes in. She gives presentations and offers Constant Contact training sessions; organizes webinars for a range of small- and medium-sized businesses and nonprofits; and produces Constant Contact campaigns for clients. She also provides LinkedIn training.

More Information

For more information about Cheryl’s Creative Services, visit: www.cherylscreativeservices.com

“When I do my marketing strategy meetings, I tell people it’s really important to know your demographics and target audience,” Henchar said. “And I’ll say ‘Is texting, email or phone better (for clients)?’ We all communicate in different ways, and it’s really important to know that with your clients.”

A Stamford native, Henchar, 53, started her business after forging a corporate career that included 12 years in customer financial services at Pepperidge Farm. In preparation for become an entrepreneur, she received a bachelor’s degree in business administration in 2010 from Sacred Heart University and two years later earned a graduate marketing certificate from the same institution.

Once she started her business, Henchar quickly earned plaudits. She won Constant Contact’s Solution Provider Rookie of the Year Award in 2014.

Clients praise Henchar for her dedication and professionalism. Her network of local businesses includes Stamford Pharmacy, which started working with her several months ago.

“We’re trying to get our name out there, and she seemed to be one of the best,” said Stamford Pharmacy pharmacist Mitchell Migden. “She’s got a newsletter for us that she does monthly, and she’s been emailing our patients ever month, and its seems to be working very nicely. She’s very enthusiastic.”

Among Henchar’s latest educational initiatives, she is leading a digital marketing series that started last week at Ferguson Library. The second installment, focusing on improving Google rankings with email and SEO video marketing, is scheduled for May 1 at the library.

“With email marketing, everything needs to be short and concise — a few lines, click, give them a link, let them choose if they want to read further,” Henchar said. “If it’s too long, people will look at it like ‘I’m not reading this; I don’t have the time.’”

2017 is the year of video marketing. According to HighQ Digital Information World, online video will account for 74% of all web traffic. 500 million people are watching Facebook videos every day. If your lack of video creation skills has been holding you back, it’s time to take a leap of faith.

Ali Mirza

Video storytelling tools

For your business to gain the visibility and success it deserves, you need to master these five video tools. With these tools you can create compelling stories without being on the camera.

1. Flipagram

Create short video stories by combining your photos, video clips, and music. Give your business a fresh and engaging appearance by creating astonishing videos with Flipagram.

How about growing your tribe and boosting your engagement? Create amazing videos and photo video slideshows with free popular music, get featured and become an influencer in your industry.

2. Adobe Spark

Adobe Spark is a free online and mobile graphic design app. The Spark suite of mobile and web tools helps you easily create visual content such as beautiful images, videos, and web pages to tell your own story in a compelling way. Since it’s a cloud-based tool, your progress is saved and synced automatically. This means you can continue your work on mobile or desktop whenever you feel inspired.

Imagine a combination of Adobe’s pro tools like Photoshop and InDesign. That is Spark Post. The app allows you to create professional graphics in a matter of minutes by layering images with text and filters.

Thanks to Spark Page you can craft web stories. Make good use of it to craft magazine-style business stories, photo albums, online newsletters, reports, or anything else that you want to present online. It’s a simplified web editing platform, letting you combine text and imagery in a highly visual way.

3. Spark video

Downloaded more than 3.5 million times, Adobe Spark Video is a free online storytelling application that lets you create animated videos in minutes. While it isn’t a tool for filming content, it allows you to combine text, images, icons and themes in a presentation, and then add your voice over the story to create the final video.

4. Animoto

Animoto, an affordable, cloud-based tool, offers a wide palette of choices and customizations that you can choose from to create unique videos. Easily tell your brand’s story by turning your photos and video clips into professional video slideshows in a matter of minutes. All you need to do is pick photos and video clips from your camera roll, choose one of the slick video themes, add some music, and you’re done. Don’t forget: sharing is caring! Share your video via message, email, Twitter, and Facebook to impress your potential clients.

5. Ripl

A freemium app, Ripl, helps you turn simple images into animated posts in seconds and share them on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Use this tool to tell your story, market your business, and promote your site.

Businesses are quickly adopting the video trend. 75% of business executives watch online videos every week. 69% of marketing, sales and business professionals have already included video in the marketing strategy. What are you waiting for?

Be on the crest of the wave. Get comfortable with using video to ignite your online presence , create brand awareness, generate leads and create conversions.

Advertising experts are set to speak next Tuesday; including Patrick Searle, cofounder and group chief executive of GetCRAFT; Jerry Hadiprojo, founder and manager of Kompas’s video content unit Pijaru; and Meirza Hartoto, digital marketing manager of Nutrifood.

The speakers are expected to discuss what constitutes video marketing, how to match an advertisement campaign’s objectives with a proper video and best practices for effective advertisements.

The Video Marketing Deep Dive will have an entrance fee of Rp 100,000 ($7.50) per person.

The Jakarta Globe is an official media partner of the Jakarta Content Marketing Meetup.

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SAN BERNARDINO, Calif. A special education teacher and one of her students were fatally shot by her estranged husband when he opened fire with a high-caliber revolver before killing himself in her classroom at a San Bernardino, California, elementary school, police said.

A second student was badly wounded by the gunman, who authorities said had a criminal history that included weapons charges and domestic violence that predated his brief marriage to the slain teacher.

Police said the two students, both boys, were believed to have been inadvertently caught in the gunfire as bystanders to Monday’s shooting, which took place about 8 miles (13 km) from where a radicalized Muslim couple killed 14 people in a December 2015 shooting rampage.

Police Chief Jarrod Burguan said the shooting at North Park Elementary School in San Bernardino, about 65 miles east of Los Angeles, was an apparent murder-suicide. It was the latest in dozens of cases of gun violence at U.S. school campuses.

The gunman was identified as Cedric Anderson, and his wife as Karen Elaine Smith, both 53. Burguan said the couple had been married briefly and had been separated for about a month or month and a half.

The two students struck by gunfire had been standing behind Smith, the chief said. One 8-year-old boy, identified as Jonathan Martinez, died from his wounds. A 9-year-old classmate who was not publicly identified was admitted to a hospital, where he was said to be in stable condition.

Fifteen students and two adult teacher assistants were in the classroom along with the couple at the time of the shooting, police said.

Police said Anderson was welcomed into the school as a legitimate visitor, stopping by the « drop something off with his wife, » and kept his weapon concealed until opening fire in the classroom, Burguan said.

ANGUISH AND RELIEF

The school was evacuated after the shooting and students were bused to the campus of California State University at San Bernardino to be briefed and interviewed by authorities. From there, they were taken to a nearby high school and be reunited with their families.

Aerial television footage showed children holding hands and walking single-file across the campus to waiting buses.

Parents waved and cheered as they greeted their children, who school staff had plied with bottled water, sandwiches and snack bars while waiting for parents to arrive.

« I’m glad my daughter is fine, » said Angelique Youmans, 31, as she hugged her 10-year-old daughter. « She is too young to understand what happened. »

Samantha Starcher, 25, said she waited four hours to be reunited with her 6-year-old daughter.

« When I heard about the shooting, I started praying, asking God to keep my daughter safe » she said. « She heard two gunshots but she didn’t know what it was. I’m not going to tell her (about the shooting) because I don’t want to traumatize her. »

School officials said North Park Elementary would remain closed for at least two days.

The city of San Bernardino last made national headlines on Dec. 2, 2015, when a husband and wife who authorities said were inspired by Islamic extremism opened fire on a holiday office party of county health workers, killing 14 people and wounding more than 20. The couple, Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik were killed by police during a shootout.

MOUNTING SCHOOL GUN VIOLENCE

The school shooting came two days after a fitness instructor returned to a Florida gym a few hours after he had been fired and shot two former colleagues to death.

An estimated 10,000 people are murdered with guns each year in the United States, according to federal crime statistics.

The United States has had an average of 52 school shooting incidents a year since a gunman killed 26 young children and educators in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012, according to Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun-control group founded in response to that massacre.

Total school shootings, a figure that includes elementary schools, high schools and colleges, regardless of whether anyone was killed or wounded, rose from 37 in 2013 to 58 in 2014 and to 65 in 2015, before declining to 48 in 2016, according to the group’s data.

With Monday’s San Bernardino incident, the United States has had 12 school shootings this year, on pace to match 2016’s tally.

Mayor Carey Davis said he had spoken about the shooting to White House officials who said President Donald Trump expressed « concern for students and teachers » at North Park.

Security experts said schools have few options to limit such incidents, given the prevalence of guns in the United States.

« If people have guns, people are going to use guns, so it’s literally the price that we pay for that freedom, » said. John DeCarlo, a criminal justice professor at the University of New Haven and the former chief of police in Branford, Connecticut.

One answer, he said, would be for all schools to sweep everyone who entered with metal detectors like those used at airports and sports venues. U.S. Education Department data said just 2 percent of U.S. schools require people entering to pass through metal detectors, up from 1 percent in 2000.

Gun control activist Shannon Watts, who founded Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America following the Newtown shooting, said her group will continue to push for regulation on gun access rather than metal detectors as a solution.

« It’s a cultural question, » she said. « Do we want to become a country of magnetometers and safety checkpoints and gun lockers? »

(Additional reporting by Steve Gorman, Piya Sinha-Roy and Dan Whitcomb in Los Angeles and Scott Malone in Boston; Writing by Steve Gorman; Editing by Toni Reinhold and Bill Trott)

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Reposted with permission from Matt Bonelli. 

Because this post is about video, we’ll let the video above do the talking.

If you are looking for a great tool to help you with your video email communication, check out BombBomb. I use this tool and love it (and no, I’m not getting paid to say that).

Matt Bonelli is a manager and broker associate for Turpin Realtors’ Chatham office in Chatham, New Jersey. You can follow him on Twitter or learn more about him on LinkedIn.