EyeView's Blog

7 Ways To Ensure Your Video Doesn't Work

Once you've commissioned your website video you want to be absolutely sure that it does you no good at all. Here are the top seven questions you should be asking yourself if you want to ensure that your video has less than zero impact on your site and its ability to convert your visitors.

1. How long is it?

Videos should be at least eight minutes long to make sure you fit every word of your user manual  into the script. Always start with a long tracking shot or a view of the planet from outer space that slowly focuses in on your office in the business district. People always want to see where you work even if it has nothing to do with your product.

Make sure you don’t reveal your company’s message too early on. Nobody likes spoilers.

Don’t bother with a call to action. People will naturally intuit what you want them to do.

2. Where is it?

When people visit your site make sure they have no idea there's a video. The more money you spend on a one-off video, the deeper within your site the video should be buried.

Under no circumstances should the video be on your home page. If, by some miracle, one of your visitors stumbles across the right URL, you should hide the play button so that there is no chance it will ever be clicked on.

Never set your video to autoplay. But, if you do, make sure that it autoplays for the same visitor every time they land on the right page ensuring maximum annoyance. Don’t set the video to react differently to first-time and repeat visitors; they’ll just think you’re being clever.

3. What player should I use?

Choose the simplest player you can find. Don’t worry about streaming issues. Your visitors will be glad to wait while the video loads. When your video finishes, the player should encourage users to leave your site and watch more videos somewhere else. As Sting once said, “If you love somebody, set them free.”

4. What language is it in?

Videos should be in English only. If your potential customer speaks even a little bit of English he won’t want to be patronized by having a voiceover in his mother tongue or a choice of subtitles. If he doesn’t speak English, you probably don’t want him anyway. If you insist on adding additional language choices, make sure this option is well hidden and certainly don’t set the language default according to the geo-location of the visitor.

5. What if I want to make changes?

Changes? What changes? It’s not like your website ever changes! The beauty of paying a lump sum up front to a video design company is that you never have to worry about changing things. You simply can’t. Much better to wait until you have more budget next year and start again with a new design company.

6. What should it look like?

Ideally your video should be as flashy as possible using as many special effects as you can manage. Try to confuse and distract your visitors with hidden meanings and bizarre visual references. Saturate the screen with fluorescent colors to give visitors a headache that will always remind them of you.

7. How do I measure success?

Are you kidding? You don’t want to measure success! Metrics are for losers. Your video should be a work of art with nothing to prove and no one to prove it to.

It doesn’t just matter that no one watches your video, it’s also important that no one does anything after watching your video. It’s kinda Zen.

Good luck.

What's Your Conversion Strategy? Part II

After Part I of my investigation, I was flooded with responses from across the globe. As expected, most marketers are still hung up on traffic as the only indication of a site’s success, but a couple of people came back with real suggestions.

Deborah Discount wrote in from Delaware to tell me all about her conversion strategy involving deeply discounted premium stock to remove barriers to entry for nervous buyers.

I also got a note from Ronny Rewards in Rochester with a super suggestion about rewarding visitors when they become users.

Great ideas both, but they’re missing a major ingredient: video.

Video is the key to engaging your visitors once they make it to your site. This isn’t revolutionary. Everyone knows that video, or rather, good video, is extremely sticky. But, at EyeView, what we’re seeing with our clients is not just random stickiness but a measurable increase in conversion rates. In other words, the right video, presented in the right way, can actually lead your conversion strategy rather than just be another marketing dart thrown over the shoulder at a moving target.

Video is entertaining, educational and engaging but next time someone asks you what your conversion strategy is, you should also mention that video has a measurable impact on turning visitors into leads.

How you go about measuring that impact is a topic for a whole other day. Feel free to write in your suggestions while I work up to my next post.

What's Your Conversion Strategy? Part I

You are, I’m sure, familiar with the old maxim that says that there are three important elements when it comes to selling your home: location, location, location.

For years now a similar maxim has been in use to identify the three most important attributes of a site for selling your products online: traffic, traffic, traffic.

Now let’s be clear, I love traffic. Traffic is awesome and there is nothing like watching your traffic increase exponentially as all the online marketing programs you committed to start paying off.

Traffic is a good thing.

But it’s not the only thing.

Once you have persuaded all those people to visit your site, you had better have a clear understanding of what you want them to do there. In other words, what was the point of your site in the first place? You’d be amazed at how many business owners have to think hard before they can answer that question.

But let’s assume that you know why you want people to visit your site. You’ve done everything you know how to get them to your site and you know exactly what you want them to do when they’re there. Now what?

That’s right. What are you going to do to convince more than the standard one or two percent of visitors to become users or subscribers or even paying customers? In other words, what’s your conversion strategy?

When you start to think about conversion, you really start to understand why you went online in the first place. You can lead a horse to water, but can you make him enter his email address and opt-in to your free monthly newsletter? (NOTE FROM BOSS: No more horse metaphors, please!)

Breaking Up With Viral Video

I’m done with Viral Video. Finally. To be fair, in the last few months neither of us was really committed to the relationship and it’s been a while since people thought we were a couple, but now I’m finally done. No more friends with benefits, I’ve moved on.

History Of A Relationship

I knew a bit about Viral Video before we started going steady. Back in 2005 a few friends sent me emails and I started to show interest. Viral Video looked fresh, it looked fun, but I wasn’t in a place where I could make a real connection. Six months later, as often happens in these stories, fate played its part when I changed jobs and found myself working everyday with Viral Video. Those were magical days when the whole world seemed to open up and accept our happiness. Viral Video was always surprising me. Every time I thought I knew where she was going, Viral Video would spring up from somewhere totally different to delight and tickle me. First she was a shy and lonely girl teasing me with her creepy secrets and then she was a pair of eccentric lab technicians experimenting with diet soda geysers. But there were dark days too; days when it would all get too much for Viral Video and she would just weep for hours or get a bit manic.

 

Doubts

The more we worked together, the closer we became. At first, I could ignore Viral Video’s flaws, but as the relationship developed, I started to understand a few things about Viral Video. Viral Video will never settle down. Viral Video is a free spirit and free spirits can’t be tied to simple concepts like ‘where’, ‘when’ and ‘how much?’. In my heart of hearts I knew Viral Video could never give me what I needed – security, consistency, reciprocity. Professionally, Viral Video was becoming more and more of a liability. Every time I took Viral Video into a meeting, advertisers would get uncomfortable and try to discuss the numbers while Viral Video would sit cross-legged on the conference table and talk distractedly about buzz and virtual water-coolers. It was only a matter of time.

 

Looking Back

When I look back on the years I spent with Viral Video, I don’t have any regrets. Regrets, as Tracy Jordan once said, “are for horseshoes and handbags.” But I’m pleased our time is over. It was just too hectic.

 

The Future

These days I’m much happier with Conversion Video. Conversion Video helps turn all those casual visitors that the SEO gnomes deliver into paying customers. Conversion Video understands what I need and gives it to me every time. I’m happier, my clients are happier and Conversion Video has made it all possible. I can see a long and profitable future with Conversion Video.

I feel lucky to have loved not once, but twice and blessed to have found a true life-partner the second time around.

Topify The World, Ma!

I’m a newcomer to Twitter, but I can already see some of the ways it’s consuming my time unnecessarily. Every time someone decides to follow me (which I still find pretty thrilling), I get an email with a link. I have to follow that link if I want to find out more about my new follower and then click again when I decide to commit to the courtesy of a follow back.

It seems like a lot of clicking to manage a simple relationship, so I was delighted when we started working with Topify. With Topify you get a much more attractive email with loads more useful information such as the user’s profile and last few updates. Then if you decide that your new follower is worth following back, you just hit reply and send. Brilliant.

If you're quick, you can still get an invitation to the Topify Beta by clicking here.

When we put together our video for Topify we kept it as easy to use as the service itself. A nice animated trigger on their home page leads into a clean, branded player with chapter buttons and all the social media bookmarks you could wish for.

Ouriel at Topify has already been tweeting contentedly about the new look and I think our guys have done a great job in telling a straightforward story in a clear and compelling way.

It’s good to see that we’re delivering everything we promised to customers like these.